The Effect of Pragmalinguistic Focus on Form on Iranian EFL Learners’ Production of Refusal Forms: with a Focus on Marked Recasts and Elicitation

Nasrin Hadidi Tamjid,Mohsen Noroozi

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.3n.2p.53

Abstract

The role of instruction to develop learners’ pragmatic competence in both second and foreign language contexts has recently motivated a great deal of research. However, most of this research has adopted an explicit instructional approach with only a few studies attempting to operationalize a more implicit condition for pragmatic learning. This study was set up to reexamine the effects of pragmalinguistic focus on form on Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic development and to compare the effects of two feedback types (marked recasts and elicitations) in raising the learners’ awareness in producing appropriate English refusals. Adopting a pretest-posttest design, the study included 21 participants with two experimental groups (marked recast group versus elicitation group) but no control group, adopting a pretest-posttest design. Both of the groups performed role plays. In marked recast group, the researcher provided the learners with marked recasts while in elicitation group, he used elicitation strategies to deal with erroneous utterances. The results from a written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) showed the effectiveness of pragmalinguistic focus on form on the participants’ pragmatic development and revealed that although both of the techniques were effective, there were no significant differences between them in raising the learners’ pragmatic ability to produce appropriate refusal forms. The findings of the study suggest that pragmatic instruction, which seems necessary, can be operationalized through both recast and elicitation, as two techniques of Focus on Form.

Highlights

Nowadays, learning a foreign language is regarded as an essential component in the curricula at different educational levels
The corresponding hypothesis predicted that marked recasts have positive effects on the Iranian EFL learners' production of refusal forms, i.e., learners who received marked recasts would benefit them in producing refusal forms
Comparing the learners' posttest and pretest scores in marked recast group (MRG) group, the researcher found that providing learners with pragmalinguistic marked recasts can assist them to develop their pragmatic competence, which is delimited to the production of refusal forms in this study

Summary

Introduction

Nowadays, learning a foreign language is regarded as an essential component in the curricula at different educational levels. In order to make learners become communicatively competent in English, there was a need for a shift from previous theoretical frameworks, which consider language as a formal system based on grammatical rules, towards a more communicative perspective This change became possible with the introduction of pragmatics as a specific area of study within linguistics that had a focus on interactional and contextual factors of the target language (Alcaraz, 1990, 1996, as cited in Martinez Flor, 2004). The growing importance and attention paid to examining learners' pragmatic knowledge has given rise to a new area of research known as Interlanguage pragmatics The findings from this line of research suggest that learners' pragmatic competence is incomplete despite having a high level of grammatical knowledge or having spent time in the target language community (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001). It has been argued that teaching pragmatic conventions is necessary to develop learners' ability to communicate appropriately in the target language, in the foreign language context (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Rose & Kasper, 2001)

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