Amina BENABDELOUAHAB.Dhiya Eddine CHIKHAOUI, Dr. Imane CHERIET2023-07-032023-07-032023-06AN/003/2023http://dspace.univ-msila.dz:8080//xmlui/handle/123456789/39946Abstract EFL pragmatics research, particularly research focusing on EFL speech act realization, has recently garnered more attention. Therefore, the purposes of this thesis are to evaluate the pragmatic competence of EFL students when they deliver a speech act of complaint, to ascertain the areas in which they face difficulty during the realization of the speech act of complaint, to explore their usage of various complaint strategies, as well as to discern whether gender plays an integral role in speech act realization. This descriptive study opted for the mixed research design in order to accomplish the study's goals, making use of both quantitative and qualitative data analysis and collection tools. Two tools were used for those purposes: the discourse evaluation task (DET) and the discourse completion task (DCT), respectively. These tests were administered to a sample of 30 EFL students ranging from the third year level to the master two level at the University of Mohamed Boudiaf, M’sila. The results of the study show that the EFL students had a good level of complaint realization on average, that they were consistently reasonable in their choice of complaint strategies and that they were flexible in switching complaint strategies when the situation necessitated it.Moreover, the study found that there was no statistically significant difference between the performance of male students and female students at the level of significance 𝛼𝛼=0.05. As such, EFL students’ realization of complaints was tackled from various angles, and based on the findings of the study, training in pragmatic competence should be considered as an addition to the English syllabus.enKeywords: Pragmatic competence, speech act of complaint, EFL speech act realizationThesis