The purpose of this mixed methods study was to examine the pragmatic awareness of speech acts of Iraqi English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in terms of gender differences. The study used a Pragmatic Awareness Assessment Tool (PAAT), consisting of two parts: metapragmatic judgment tasks, discourse completion tasks and multiple-choice comprehension items, followed by semi-structured interviews with 24 participants, and was conducted using an explanatory sequential design. The in-service EFL teachers were 120 secondary school and university teachers (60 males and 60 females) in Thi-Qar Province in Iraq.The quantitative results showed that the participants had moderate MP overall (M = 67.8/100) and a significant recognition-production gap (M = 72.3 for MP Task vs. M = 61.4 for Discourse Completion Task). Apologies were seen as easiest (M = 74.2) of the three speech acts targeted, followed by requests (M = 68.5), and refusals were the most difficult (M = 60.7). Female teachers were significantly more pragmatic aware than male teachers (M = 71.2, N = 84, vs M = 64.4, N = 74, p < .001, Cohen's d = 0.81), especially when refusing (d = 1.04).Qualitative data showed that most of the participants learned pragmatic knowledge mostly from informal sources mainly English language media (87.5%) and not from formal teacher education (25%). The majority of teachers (79.2%) indicated that they were not well prepared to teach pragmatics explicitly due to a lack of training, limited metapragmatic vocabulary and constraints in the curriculum. According to the thematic analysis, the female group showed greater level of metapragmatic reflection, politeness sensitivity, face sensitivity, and awareness of gender in the pragmatic dimension.
