Interlanguage Pragmatic Motivation: Its Construct and Impact on Speech Act Production

The aim of this pioneering study was to define and describe motivation for the acquisition of interlanguage pragmatic competence. Interlanguage pragmatic motivation was investigated from two perspectives: (1) general pragmatic motivation, displaying L2 learners’ motivation to acquire pragmatic strategies, pragmatic routines, politeness strategies, turn-taking patterns, and cultural familiarity; and (2) speech-act-specific motivation, representing learners’ motivation to acquire the pragmalinguistic forms and sociopragmatic norms of performing speech acts. Seventy-five EFL learners were studied using two pragmatic motivation questionnaires and a discourse completion task. The relationships among the general pragmatic motivation, speech-act-specific motivation, and pragmatic production were then investigated. The findings showed that EFL learners are highly motivated to learn English language pragmatic features from both motivational perspectives. Further analyses revealed that the learners fell short of having satisfactory L2 pragmatic production. Regression equations revealed that speech-act-specific motivation has the explanatory power of predicting pragmatic production in EFL learners but general pragmatic motivation does not manifest such an influence on L2 learners’ production. It is concluded that high general pragmatic motivation does not necessarily correlate with better pragmatic production.