As the majority of English teachers in the world, non-native English teachers constitute an individual area of research interest in the field of foreign language education because of their two-faceted identity as both teachers and language learners. Since gaining communicative competence is the desired outcome of today’s language education policies, learning about and improving non-native pre-service English teachers’ communicative skills are fundamental for better language education practices. In terms of communicative competence, pragmatics plays an important role as it focuses on the contexts in which we use language.Therefore, the current study aimed to investigate the speech act of complaint realized by Turkish pre-service English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in order to see the strategies they used in comparison to the strategies they used in Turkish, and the strategies used by English native speakers.The data were collected from 60 non-native pre-service English teachers, and 10 native English speaking teachers. A 4-item discourse completion task (DCT) was used to elicit complaints in university contexts from the participants.The frequencies of strategies used were measured. The results showed us that the most frequent strategy wasrequest for repairin all groups, and the most frequent 3 strategies were request for repair, indirect accusation, and hints in the data of Turkish native speakers and non-native English speakers.The other strategies were found out to vary between informant groups. Although no serious deviation from native data was found in non-native data, the similarity between native Turkish data and non-native English data showed that Turkish pre-service English teachers’ interlanguage pragmatic competence was affected by their native language, which could cause problems in intercultural communication contexts and in their teaching practices related to improving learners’ pragmatic competence.