Complaining is one of the difficult tasks one has to do because when one complains,
one does not only express some displeasure but also expects some form of repair. Hence, it
is important for language learners to be taught how to effectively do so. Despite this, the
teaching of the speech act of complaint has been taken for granted: either very little is
included or it is absent in the language classroom instruction. This study attempts to examine
how Filipino ESL learners structure their complaints. Featuring 18 situations calibrated on
three social variables ( interlocutors’ social power and social distance, as well as the
complainable acts’ degree of severity), the discourse completion task elicited respondents’
written expression of complaints, which were then analyzed using Schaefer’s (1982, as cited
in Celce- Murcia & Olshtain, 2000) framework for analyzing the semantic formula of
complaints. Results of the study provide a baseline data on respondents’ language of
complaining, which provides many pedagogical implications and serves as a springboard for
the development of classroom resource materials leading to an informed and judicious
teaching of pragmatics.
