Developing Pragmatic Awareness of Requests in the EFL Classroom: A Focus on Instructional Effects

Explicit teaching of pragmatics to second language learners has been studied by a large number of researchers. However, the review of the related studies shows that while some researchers believe in the effectiveness of explicit instruction of pragmatics, others believe that explicit instruction is not effective and it does not contribute to the language learners’ pragmatics awareness.  The main goal of this study was to investigate the outcomes of teaching pragmatics- focusing on the concept of politeness through the speech act of request - by explicit intervention. The participants were Iranian intermediate 36 EFL students who were selected through convenience sampling.  A quasi-experimental research method was used, and the participants were divided into two groups. The experimental group benefited from overt metapragmatic discussions and explanations, role plays and other pragmatically-oriented tasks. Different instruments were used: a written discourse completion test (DCT), a general English proficiency test to homogenize the participants, a pre-test of participant's initial pragmatic awareness and ability in politeness, and a post-test of pragmatic awareness and ability in the production of politeness features following the periods of instruction. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (t-test). The results of data analyses revealed that students' speech act comprehension and production improved significantly in the explicit instruction group, but no change was made in students' speech act comprehension and production of the students who received no instruction. It is concluded that pragmatic competence can be taught to EFL learners explicitly.