The Pragmatic Competence of Advanced Igbo Language Learners: Comparing Non-Native and Native Speaker Performance in Formal and Informal Contexts

This dissertation investigates the pragmatic competence of advanced Igbo language learners, comparing their performance with native speaker norms across a range of speech act and discourse pragmatic tasks in both formal and informal interactional contexts. Pragmatic competence represents one of the most challenging dimensions of advanced language proficiency to acquire, and for Igbo learners, culturally specific pragmatic norms governing politeness, face management, proverb use, and elder-directed discourse add additional complexity beyond phonological and grammatical mastery. The study recruits sixty advanced Igbo learners from university Igbo language programmes in Abuja, Lagos, and Kano, matched with sixty native speaker controls balanced for age, education level, and urban-rural background. Pragmatic competence is assessed through discourse completion tasks, role play recordings, and naturalised interactional data collection across six speech act categories and four contextual register conditions. Native and non-native data are compared using pragmatic rating scales validated with independent native speaker judges. Findings reveal that advanced learners achieve near-native performance on formulaic politeness strategies but demonstrate significant divergence in proverb deployment appropriateness, elder-directed address system selection, and contextually calibrated indirectness levels in conflict management contexts. Formal contexts generate higher pragmatic native-likeness scores than informal contexts for all learner groups. Hausa-background learners show the widest pragmatic competence gaps attributable to cross-cultural pragmatic interference. Keywords: Igbo pragmatic competence, advanced learners, speech acts, intercultural pragmatics, native speaker norms.