Abstract
Although the use of technology for pragmatics instruction has attracted significant attention from scholars, the number of studies regarding the impact of self-access materials to this end is limited. Nearpod is a useful cloud-based application to support self-paced learning. This paper aims to probe the effect of learning through Nearpod on EFL learners’ request performance. Researchers designed seven self-access courses to teach requests. The data was collected from 11 EFL learners through Online Oral Discourse Completion Tasks before and after the treatment. The post-test results revealed that the participants significantly improved their request performance after the treatment. The learners’ responses in the pre-test and the post-test were also qualitatively analyzed for an in-depth investigation of the changes in their requesting behavior. The findings revealed that the learners stopped modality generalization and started using a variety of modal verbs according to the context of situation after the treatment. Additionally, it was indicated that self-paced pragmatics instruction helped learners overcome the pragmatic failures regarding the main verb use in request head acts. Furthermore, the differences regarding the learners’ use of internal and external modifiers were also documented. After the treatment, they performed various internal modifiers that were either absent or uncommon in the pre-test data. Alerters and grounders were found to be the most frequent external modifiers in both the pre-test and the post-test data set. In summary, the results indicated that self-paced learning helped learners improve strategies for performing appropriate requests.
Highlights
There has been a growing interest in the field of instructional pragmatics for the last two decades
The findings revealed that EFL learners fail to perform internal modification strategies
The requests obtained from the pre-test and the post-test were analyzed qualitatively to show on what grounds the learners improved their request performance
Summary
There has been a growing interest in the field of instructional pragmatics for the last two decades It is still underrepresented in EFL classrooms. With the nascence of various models of communicative competence (Hymes, 1972; Canale & Swain, 1980; Bachman, 1990), the view of language instruction shifted from learning grammatical formulas and lexicon to learning to use language effectively and appropriately in various contexts. This shift, as a result, has made pragmatics instruction an indispensable component of foreign language classrooms. Many studies have revealed that even proficient speakers of English fail to perform appropriate language according to the context of the situation (Karatepe, 1998, 2001; Tajeddin & Pirhosseinloo, 2012)
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