An Explicit/Implicit Lead to Producing Requests: Eliciting Learners’ Awareness or Soliciting Metapragmatic Knowledge

Nasim Ariana,Masoumeh Ahmadi Shirazi,Seyed Mohammad Mousavi Nadoushani

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.1p.115

Abstract

This study attempted to investigate the extent to which two types of pragmatic instruction -explicit versus implicit- affect learners’ knowledge in terms of their awareness and production of request strategies. Thirty students with the same level of proficiency were divided into two groups (explicit and implicit). They were exposed to listening excerpts taken from the book Tactics for Listening, with the focus on request making strategies. While the explicit group was equipped with direct awareness-raising tasks and written metapragmatic explanations on the use of appropriate requests, the implicit group was provided with a set of implicit awareness-raising tasks. Outcomes of the study demonstrate that pragmatic instruction of requesting improved learners’ awareness of both groups. Also an improvement of learners’ production of requests did take place in both groups after the interventional period. However, the explicit group outperformed the implicit one as far as production of request making was concerned.Keywords: Pragmatic competence, Speech acts, Requests, Explicit/Implicit pragmatic instruction

Highlights

Pragmatics, one important component of the study of human language, is an exciting and fast growing field of today’s applied linguistics that many foreign and second language teaching systems in recent decades consider it as an inseparable part of their organizing principles, since it is concerned with the study of meaning
Searle (1979) notes that the most influential and dominant field in this intersection is the study of speech acts -one important area of pragmatics in which learners of foreign language differ from native speakers in terms of production of pragmatics
Results related to questions 1 to 4, seem to confirm previous studies (Olshtain and Cohen, 1990; Morrow, 1995; Alcon, 2005; Safont, 2005), since all reported a positive impact of instruction on pragmatic learning

Summary

Introduction

Pragmatics, one important component of the study of human language, is an exciting and fast growing field of today’s applied linguistics that many foreign and second language teaching systems in recent decades consider it as an inseparable part of their organizing principles, since it is concerned with the study of meaning. Alcon (2005) reported an advantage for the explicit group in comparison with implicit and control group, as far as request making was concerned While both treatment groups (explicit and implicit) improved after the instructional course, students in the control group were not able to develop their pragmatic knowledge in terms of neither awareness nor production of requests. Both treatment groups outperformed the control one, but no significant differences were reported between implicit and explicit groups in terms of awareness and production of suggestion. Acquisition of different speech acts of pragmatics, our study was an investigation to discover whether the implicit and explicit instruction have any effect on Iranian EFL learners’ ability to comprehend and produce pragmatic strategies of request making. · Is there any significant difference between the effectiveness of explicit and implicit instruction on learners’ production of pragmatics?

Method

Participants

Instrumentation and Procedures

Result