Complaints about exam difficulty in Jordanian Arabic: a pragmatic study of head act strategies used by undergraduates

The study examined how Jordanian undergraduates complain to their professors about exam difficulty from a pragmatic perspective, an under-explored area of research. It focused specifically on the head act strategies used to realize complaints in the university setting. To this end, closed role-plays with 124 Jordanian undergraduates were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Drawing on Olshtain and Weinbach (1987) and Trosborg (1995) , the analysis revealed that Jordanian undergraduates deployed ten different strategies: “negative emotions”, “blaming”, “accusation”, “threatening and warning”, “explicit complaint”, “request for repair”, “irony”, “showing contrast”, “below the level of reproach”, and “grievance to God”. The strategies with the highest frequency were “explicit complaint”, “negative emotions”, and “blaming”. In terms of (in)directness, the strategies were classified into two categories: direct and indirect. Jordanian undergraduates showed a stronger tendency to employ direct strategies when complaining. Three new complaining strategies were identified in the present data: “irony”, “showing contrast”, and “grievance to God”, which are not accommodated by the existing taxonomies, suggesting the need to extend these taxonomies.