The acquisition of pragmatic markers in the foreign language classroom: An experimental study on the effects of implicit and explicit learning

Abstract

This study discusses the results of an experimental study on the usage of pragmatic markers (PMs) by adolescent German-speaking L2 learners of English in the foreign language classroom. The experiment measured the success of PM usage skills under explicit and implicit learning conditions based on input flood, compared to a control group that received no training on the use of PMs. Competence in using PMs was measured with communicative tasks in a pretest (immediately prior to the experiment) and a posttest (one day after the training). The results, which derive from spoken conversational data collected from 18 advanced learners of English in a high school context, show that short-term effects as regards usage frequency and diversity of PMs could be reached only for the learners who underwent explicit teaching, who showed a significant increase in the frequency of use of PMs in conversational L2 speech and expanded the range of PMs beyond the set of PMs that had been used before the training. The results raise intriguing questions regarding the learnability of conversational routines in L2 acquisition.