An Investigation into EFL Learners’ Perception towards L2 Pragmatic Instruction

Abstract

The present study investigated EFL students’ perception toward the pragmatic instruction provided as a part of regular English curricula. A total of 52 university students from various majors participated in the study. The treatment was given for nine weeks during the regular class hours in terms of four speech acts, compliments, apologies, requests, and refusals, with the goal of enhancing the learners’ pragmatic awareness as well as pragmatic competence. A questionnaire and the learners’ reflection journals were adopted as data collection instruments, and an eclectic design was adopted to analyze their perception. Both the intermediate and low groups showed positive perception in terms of the four major categories—interest, usefulness, importance, and motivation, yet more than half of the learners from the low group found that learning L2 pragmatics was difficult due to the complexity and length of some of the sentence patterns of formulaic expressions. Further, there were significant differences between subjects regarding the category of difficulty for each speech act. Nevertheless, the learners expressed that pragmatic instruction facilitated their communication skills, enhanced their pragmatic awareness on intercultural differences, as well as instilled confidence in English interactions. These findings imply learners’ motivation and needs for learning L2 pragmatic features.