Pragmatic Competence in Arabic Among Nigerian University Graduates: An Assessment of Speech Act Performance

Pragmatic competence, encompassing the ability to use language appropriately across social contexts and to perform speech acts in culturally adequate ways, has been identified as a critical dimension of communicative proficiency that is frequently underdeveloped even among grammatically proficient Arabic learners. This study assesses the pragmatic competence of Nigerian university Arabic graduates in performing key speech acts in Arabic, specifically requests, apologies, and expressions of gratitude, comparing their performance with native Arabic speaker norms. Using a discourse completion task methodology, the research presents 100 recently graduated Nigerian Arabic programme alumni drawn from universities in Kano, Ibadan, and Abuja with 24 contextualised scenario prompts requiring the target speech acts in varying social distance and power imposition conditions. Responses are analysed for speech act strategy choice, level of directness, use of mitigators and supportive moves, and formulaic expression accuracy, using native speaker norms established through parallel administration to 30 native Arabic speakers. The study finds that Nigerian Arabic graduates systematically differ from native speaker norms on directness level and mitigator use in requests, underusing conventional Arabic politeness formulae and relying on grammatically correct but pragmatically marked structures. Apology and gratitude speech act performance is closer to native norms. The study recommends the explicit integration of Arabic pragmatic instruction into university Arabic curricula. Keywords: Pragmatic competence, Arabic speech acts, Nigerian graduates, discourse completion task, communicative proficiency.