Iraqi EFL University Students’ Strategies of Producing Invitation

Abstract

Invitations are social activities that usually occur among individuals (and particularly among friends) in everyday life, utilized to keep rapport, increase social solidarity, and maintain good relationships. However, people use various types of pragmatic and linguistic strategies to yield invitations. Thus, this paper aims to detect Iraqi University students’ ability to use the illocutionary act of invitation. Fifty Iraqi EFL 4^th year students of the University of Misan have been administered to a production text. Responses to the test have been collected and analyzed. The paper concludes that those students mostly do not have the ability to produce utterances of invitation, and they encounter difficulty when producing them. In addition, they show a high preference to use modality, imperatives and interrogatives in most situations. Most of their utterances concerning invitation are translations of Iraqi utterances used in everyday Iraqi spoken situations.