The Impact of the Speech Acts Used Purposefully on EFL Classroom Communicative Competency (Case study of the EFL teacher in Smart International Schools Khartoum/Sudan)

Abstract

Abstract This study aims to identify the impact of the use of speech acts techniques and strategies in EFL classroom on academic achievement and communicative competency. The purpose of this research is to find out which speech acts mostly used by an EFL teacher that have great impact to the learners’ comprehension to the target language. While teaching, the reason of why certain speech acts is preferred by the teacher. The study uses Searle’s taxonomy of speech act classification as the tool to classify the teachers talk. The findings of the research show the frequency of each classification shows that the teacher mostly used Directive speech act due to his use of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method of teaching and it was a success and impacted the students’ communicative competency positively. Nonetheless, it is known that utterances may have more than just one act sometimes, therefore, the researcher has done his best figuring out what is the most appropriate one based on the context and the co-text elements. The use of directive speech act apparently make implication towards the improvement of the students’ productive skills. The study concludes that the choice of speech acts classification determines the teaching approach and vice versa. It is recommended for English teachers to help students to achieve communicative competency to use more directive speech acts and it is highly recommended that iiiteachers should be familiar with the speech acts forms and understand using the right acts to help their students achieve communicative competency. Finally, it is recommended that teachers should use more expressive acts to motivate, support, and build strong rapport with their students.