Pragmatic Competence in German Among Nigerian Masters Students: A Speech Act Analysis

This study examines pragmatic competence in German among Masters-level students at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Kaduna State, North West Nigeria, with a focus on the production and comprehension of selected speech acts. Pragmatic competence, the ability to use language appropriately in social and communicative contexts, represents a dimension of language proficiency that is frequently neglected in favour of grammatical and lexical development. Speech acts such as requests, apologies, refusals, and compliments are particularly revealing sites for examining cross-cultural pragmatic transfer, as their realisation is deeply influenced by cultural norms that differ substantially between German and Nigerian interactional contexts. The study employs a mixed-methods design using a discourse completion task to elicit pragmatic production data from 80 Masters students, alongside a pragmatic listening comprehension test assessing pragmatic interpretation. Findings from the production data are compared against a baseline of native German speaker responses gathered from published pragmatic corpora. Results indicate that Nigerian German learners employ significantly less direct request strategies, longer apology sequences, and less explicit refusal formulations than native German speakers, suggesting negative pragmatic transfer from Nigerian politeness norms. The study recommends the inclusion of explicit cross-cultural pragmatic instruction in postgraduate German communication courses. Keywords: pragmatic competence, German speech acts, Nigerian Masters students, cross-cultural pragmatics, Ahmadu Bello University.