Abstract
The present study investigated the extent to which two instructional paradigms—explicit vs. implicit instruction—affect learners’ ability to use the speech act of request in English. Ninety homogenous adult Iranian intermediate EFL learners attending a language school in Isfahan, Iran, were randomly assigned to three groups: Explicit Group (EG), Implicit Group (IG) and Control Group (CG)). A pre-test was given to the three groups to measure the participants’ ability to use requests prior to any treatment. Then, all the groups were exposed to short conversations (audio and script) including certain requests. However, while the EG received explicit and deductive instruction by means of direct awareness-raising tasks and metapragmatic explanations, the IG was provided only with typographical enhancement of the request strategies in focus. The students in the CG did not receive any instruction. The results of the post-test, administered after the treatment, indicated that both explicit and implicit instruction exert a significant effect on the learners’ production of request strategies in English. It was also found that participants who received explicit instruction outperformed those in the implicit group; however; the observed difference was not statistically significant. Accordingly, it can be claimed that an implicit and unobtrusive method such as input enhancement can be as effective as explicit instruction which requires the execution of various awareness-raising tasks and explanation of metapragmatic information.
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