Pragmatic comprehension of apology, request and refusal: An investigation on the effect of consciousness-raising video-driven prompts

Abstract

Recent research in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has substantiated that some aspects of pragmatics are amenable to instruction in the second or foreign language classroom. However, there are still controversies over the most conducive teaching approaches and the required materials. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of consciousnessraising video-driven prompts on the comprehension of the three speech acts of apology, request, and refusal on seventy eight (36 male and 42 female) upper-intermediate Persian learners of English who were randomly assigned to four groups (metapragmatic, form-search, role play, and control). The four groups were exposed to 45 video vignettes (15 for each speech act) extracted from different episodes of Flash Forward, Stargate TV Series and Annie Hall Film for nine 60-minute sessions of instruction twice a week. Results of the multiple choice discourse completion test (MDCT) indicated that learners’ awareness of apologies, requests and refusals benefit from all three types of instruction, but the results of the Post hoc test of Tukey (HSD) illustrated that the metapragmatic group outperformed the other treatment groups, and that form-search group had a better performance than role-play and control groups.