الفهرس 
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Abstract
The purpose of the present study is to investigate the pragmatic competence of Egyptian EFL learners when performing the speech act of complaining. The study attempts to identify the main semantic components used by Egyptian EFL learners while making complaints in English and compare them with the semantic formulas produced by English native speakers. Additionally, the study aims at examining the influence of social variables on the production of complaints by both the EFL learners and the native speakers. To generate data for this study, sixty-one Egyptian EFL learners and eleven native speakers of English complete a Discourse Completion Test in which they are requested to provide their natural responses to seven situations denoting the speech act of complaint. The collected data is analyzed according to a modified taxonomy of complaint proposed by Murphy and Neu (1996) which includes: “complaint”, “justification”, “criticism”, “explanation of purpose”, “demand”, “request”, “threat” and “apology”. The responses of the Egyptian EFL learners are compared to the native speakers’ using SPSS to see to what extent they are similar and different. The findings reveal that the quality of the components produced by the Egyptian learners differs significantly from those made by the native speakers. It is shown that despite their relatively long period of learning English, the Egyptian learners do not demonstrate sufficient pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic proficiency that qualify them to produce acceptable complaints in English. The native speakers complain more indirectly than the Egyptian EFL learners across all situations. Moreover, the native speakers are found to be more sensitive to the social status of their interlocutors and adjust their politeness strategies according to the social variables of the situations more than the Egyptian speakers. The study ends up with a series of recommendations and pedagogical implications that aim to improve the pragmatic competence of Egyptian learners in EFL contexts.