The Effects of Explicit/Implicit Instruction and Feedback on the Development of Persian EFL Learners‟ Pragmatic Competence in Suggestion Structures

Abstract

To date, a number of studies have investigated the speech act of suggestion. However, most of these studies have focused on the production – a sociolinguistic perspective – rather than the acquisition of this speech act. The study reported in this article aimed to compare the effects of implicit versus explicit instruction and feedback in the development of pragmatic competence of Iranian EFL learners of English in terms of the speech act of suggestion. The participants of this study consisted of 100 intermediate EFL learners of English who were randomly assigned to four experimental groups and a control group. Each experimental group participated in two twenty-minute successive sessions. The first experimental group received explicit instruction and explicit feedbacks, the second experimental group received explicit instruction and implicit feedbacks and the remaining two experimental groups were taught using implicit-explicit and implicit-implicit instruction and feedbacks, respectively. Data were collected using an immediate post-test as well as a delayed post-test which was administered a month after the post-test. Results of the study showed that the explicit-explicit method of instruction has a much better influence on Persian EFL learners. However, the results also demonstrated that the students tend to forget the instructed materials after four weeks. It follows from the results of this study that the development of pragmatic competence in terms of suggestion speech act is a complex process which proceeds in a non-linear fashion.