The Impact of Deductive, Inductive, and L1-Based Consciousness-Raising Tasks on EFL Learners' Acquisition of the Request Speech Act

Abstract

The necessity and importance of teaching pragmatics has come to light by many researchers (e.g. Rose & Kasper, 2001). Due to the consensus over the need to teach pragmatic competence, the main issue now centers on the question of how we should teach this competence in the most effective way. Consistent with this line of research, the present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of deductive, inductive, and L1-based consciousness-raising instructional tasks on EFL learners' acquisition of the request speech act during a seven-week instruction period. The results obtained through a written DCT administered to 140 EFL learners indicated that instruction had a significantly positive effect on learners' acquisition of the request speech act. The comparison of the task types demonstrated that, all in all, the deductive task was the most effective one. Furthermore, the results showed that the learners were generally receptive to L1-based awareness-raising tasks and that these tasks were more effective than inductive tasks. This study suggests that consciousness-raising instructional tasks could be utilized in raising students’ sociopragmatic awareness and be applied in helping them develop their interlanguage pragmatics.