Abstract
This study explored the effects of contextual factors, namely exposure to instruction and gender difference on Iranian EFL learners' pragmatic perception of the illocutionary act of apology. To this end, sixty four upper-intermediate English learners (34 males & 30 females ranging in age from 17 to 27), from a language institute in a city in north-eastern Iran, voluntarily took part in the study. While investigation of the effect of explicit instruction of apology speech act, through consciousness-raising listening prompts, on EFL learners' interlanguage pragmatic competence is one of the current study's prime concerns, the participants, who were equally assigned to an experimental group and a control group, were given 14 sessions of instruction accompanied, merely within the experimental class, by consciousness-raising activities via listening prompts. Adopting a multiple choice discourse completion task (MDCT) as both the pre-test and post-test, the results confirmed the beneficial effect of listening-based teaching of apology speech act juxtaposed with consciousness-raising activities on the learners' pragmatic awareness. Besides, the context-external factor of gender yielded a significant impact on the way females and males, in the experimental group, perceived the communicative act of apology. In the light of the findings, the study provides implications for curriculum designers, materials developers, and language teachers.
Highlights
Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) which studies nonnative speakers' acquisition and production of linguistic action patterns or speech acts in a second language (L2)has aroused research interest in recent years(Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993); most ILP studies have been production-oriented (Alcon, 2005; Takahashi2001; Takemoto, 2012), focusing mainly on learners' speech act strategies in their 'linguistic' output
To answer the first two research questions concerning the effect of explicit instruction of apology speech act through listening receptive skill on Iranian EFL learners' pragmatic competence on the one hand, and the role of consciousnessraising (C-R) tasks in their ILP development on the other hand, an independent samples t-test was run to compare the means of pre-test and post-test scores between C-R and non-C-R groups
The present study evaluated the relative effectiveness of listening-based pragmatic instruction with regard to the comprehension of the illocutionary act of apology.As its central themes, this study scrutinized the influential impact of explicit instruction and consciousness-raising tasks on EFL learners' pragmatic awareness on the one hand, and the role of gender on the way the learners perceived the act of apology through the receptive mode of listening prompts, on the other hand
Summary
Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) which studies nonnative speakers' acquisition and production of linguistic action patterns or speech acts in a second language (L2)has aroused research interest in recent years(Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993); most ILP studies have been production-oriented (Alcon, 2005; Takahashi2001; Takemoto, 2012), focusing mainly on learners' speech act strategies in their 'linguistic' output. A number of comprehensive models of communicative competence (e.g., Bachman & Palmer 1996;Canale& Swain 1980) recognize that becoming a competent second language user encompasses knowing more than just the correct rules and forms of a language; it involves knowing how to use language in social and pragmatic appropriate ways. Tanck (2002) states that “Speakers who may be considered “fluent” in a second language due to their mastery of the grammar and vocabulary of that language may still lack pragmatic competence; in other words, they may still be unable to produce and comprehend language that is socially and culturally appropriate” (p.1). Communicative or pragmatic competence is the ability to use language forms in a wide range of environments, factoring in the relationships between the speakers involved and the social and cultural context of the situation (Gass & Selinker, 2008; Lightbown & Spada, 1999)
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