Does Direct Instruction Develop Pragmatic Competence? Teaching Refusals to EFL Learners of English

Abstract

To achieve communicative competence, L2 learners' need to develop their pragmatic competence and this may be fostered with the help the learners receive from their teachers. This paper is an attempt to investigate the efficacy of explicit instruction of refusal at pragmatic level to four types of acts- invitations, suggestions, offers and requests. Adopting a pretest/posttest design as with treatment and control group, the two groups in this study were exposed to the treatment. Data collected by means of written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) as well as written self report suggest that the instructional approach resulted in gain in L2 pragmatic ability of the experimental group. The delayed posttest used in the study confirmed the findings. The findings may contribute to the interlanguage pragmatic pedagogy, especially in the EFL context and suggest that meta-pragmatic information the L2 learners received through pedagogy may lead to learners' L2 pragmatic development.