Effect of Consciousness-Raising Tasks on Microgenetic Development of Request Speech Act

Compared to macrodevelopmental approach (e.g., conventional cross-sectional and longitudinal methods) that investigates using pre and posttest designs and its failure to provide detailed information about how changes occur, a microdevelopmental approach (embodied in microgenetic method), which resembles making a movie, presents the advantage of observing developmental changes as they occur. Viewed from this vantage point, a macrodevelopmental approach may not afford adequate explanations of the SLA-related phenomena. This is because it may be useful for depicting the product of a process of change. The current study explored the effect of consciousness-raising tasks on the microgenetic development of request speech act. To this aim, 50 out of 60 male and female Iranian M.A. and undergraduate students, majoring in TEFL and translation respectively, in Shahrekord University were homogenized by Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and selected as the participants. Next, all the participants were administered the deductive consciousness-raising pragmatic task as the material instruction for 5 sessions and were presented with discourse completion tests (DCTs) during the first, third, and fifth sessions of instruction. Results showed that, in the course of time, the participants became more capable of producing appropriate requests in different situations and they became more conscious of using indirect requests rather than direct requests

Keywords:

microgenetic development , consciousness-raising (C-R) task , discourse completion test (DCT) , request