The Effect of Instruction on the Development of Pragmatic Competence

Abstract

The present study was conducted to examine the effect of explicit and implicit teaching of the speech acts of apologies and requests. The participants who were 40 university students were given a discourse completion test (DCT) which was designed and validated by the researcher. The students came up with situations that embodied apologies and requests. After exemplar generation and likelihood investigation some 20 items were retained and used with the students. The participants of the study consisted of two groups of implicit and explicit instruction. The two groups were intact and non-randomized. The design was quasi-experimental. To investigate the relationship between grammatical competence and pragmatic competence, students‟ scores on the DCT and their midterm test were correlated. The correlation was expectedly negative. T- Test results revealed that instruction was effective regardless of assignment of the students into the two groups. However, the explicit group, contrary to the expectations, was not necessarily superior to the implicit one. On the other hand the implicit group slightly outperformed the explicit one. This might have been due to the pre-existing differences between the two groups. In other words, the control group might have been at an advantage despite a homogeneity measure which was meant for the two groups to be put on equal footing.