FL learners should not only focus on grammatical rules, but they are also expected to have pragmatic competence which refers to the ability to use the language appropriately in different cultural contexts. This present study aims to analyse the development of pragmatic competence in refusals of Thai learners of Spanish by comparing the pragmatic competence of Thai learners of Spanish at different levels. A discourse completion test (DCT) with 12 situations was employed to collect data from 95 participants who are 35 Spanish native speakers and 60 Thai students majoring in Spanish at Khon Kaen University from second year, third year and fourth year. The results of this study can show that pragmatic competence of higher-level students is not significantly improved compared with lower-level students. Since there are many differences between Thai and Spanish cultures, it is necessary for Thai learners of Spanish to have pragmatic competence by learning the appropriate politeness strategies in refusals to avoid communication failures. Refusals are pragmatically sensitive speech acts that can easily cause misunderstandings, so non-native speakers must perform them carefully.
Fuangket Tongwanchai (Sun,) studied this question.