Pragmatic Failure of Homonyms in EFL Iraqi Learners

الملخص

Pragmatic failure is, as Jenny Thomas defines it, the inability to understand and comprehend what is meant by virtue of what is said. Pragmatic failure is of two types: pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic failure. The first of these failures, pragma-linguistic failure, is the one in which the means of the pragmatic act cannot be solved by the explanation of grammar. The second type, socio-pragmatic failure, is failure which happens when the differences of the norms and the conventions of the mother tongue and that of the second/target language which the individual tries to explain. However, students of English as a foreign language may misuse the linguistic term ‘homonyms’, where homonym means the kind of words that may have the same spelling and pronunciation, but are different in meaning which in this case requires the knowledge of the context and this would be very difficult to the students to understand. The present study tries to identify the errors (or failure) of EFL Iraqi students in using homonyms, and to find the source of the strength of the students’ pragmatic competence.  
To fulfill the aims of the study, two tests (pretest and posttest) have been conducted randomly on 50 students at Al Iraqia University – College of Education (for humanity) for the academic year 2014-2015. The reliability of the test has been verified by some officials at the branch’s Alpha to the scores. It reached to 0.86 which indicates a high achieved reliability. The results show that the students that have been tested twice (before the pretest and the posttest) show that the differences between the lowest performance and the highest are (57%) than the lowest (43%). This due to the lack of pragmatic competence. They were unaware of the words they face in the test. But, as their explanations and the source of the meaning are the context, in which the words are used, their performance gets better.