The Production of Greeting Speech Act by EFL Learners

Abstract

The current descriptive study deals with the performance of greeting speech act among EFL learners; this research is to investigate the production and use of greeting speech act by EFL learners. Therefore, the dopted hypothesis states that the production of greeting of third year students would develop if they perform greeting speech act appropriately. With regard to the work field, this study is relying on two key descriptive research tools which are the Discourse Completion Task that is administered to the sample of third year English students at Abd Elhafid Boussouf University of Mila, and the interview that is dedicated to teachers at the same niversity. Based on the the collected data via the Discourse Completion Task that aims at checking the efficiency of tudents’ performance of greetings, Discourse Completion Task’s results show that most of third year students have basic knowledge of greetings, and their performance demonstrates their poor awareness about the egree of formality of some greeting expressions, albeit students are familiar with the frequently used ones. Moreover, the findings display that students have some problems with the proper use of some other greeting expressions in different contexts. Additionally, the data gathered from the teachers’ interview affirm that third year students should be exposed more to the target culture