Gender Differences in the Usage of Speech Act of Promise among Moroccan Female and Male High School Students

Abstract

The study aims at examining and analysing speech act of promise used by male and female Moroccan high school students. Research studies conducted on speech acts in different languages and cultures serve to provide an insightful understanding of intercultural communication. They substantially help in reaching over communicative differences among speakers of divergent languages, and accordingly lay the ground for addressing and handling issues that arise from intercultural miscommunication.  This article is a research endeavour that seeks to fill the void that has been mentioned above. The core of this study is on a pragmatic-based analysis of the speech act of promising in Moroccan Arabic. More precisely, it targets identifying and investigating the widely utilized techniques of promise among male and female Moroccan high school students.

The data has been collected from questionnaires composed of 19 hypothetical real-life situations in Morocco.  The respondents of the research have been Moroccan-Arabic native speaking students studying in three public high schools in Casablanca, Morocco. The sample consists of 60 male students and 60 female students belonging to the three high school levels: common core, first year, and second year of Baccalaureate. The analysis of the data has revealed that Moroccan high school students embark on six strategies while constructing promise utterances, namely, self-repetition, conditional promises that incorporate Al Istithna (exception) promises and if promises, swearing tactic, assurance-based expressions, self-praising attributions, and preferred adjacency pairs technique. Furthermore, the findings of this study have exhibited that there are significant differences in the use of those strategies among male and female Moroccan high school students as they perform the speech act of promising. It has been proven through the distinct use of promising strategies that both genders speak different languages. Unlike male respondents whose language seems to be assertive, adversarial, and strong, female respondents speak a language of support, politeness, cooperation, and social affiliation.