The Effect of Explicit vs. Implicit Pragmatic Instruction on the Pragmatic Comprehension of Intermediate Iranian EFL Learners: A Case of Apology and Request

Since the idea of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) which is the acceptance of the communicative approach to second language teaching process has been introduced into language education and become one of the major concerns of linguistic scholars (Cohen &Olshtain, 1981), there has been an agreement that pragmatic competence is known as one of the significant components of communicative competence and should receive sufficient attention by the educators and learners of a foreign language. In this respect, it is believed that incorporating knowledge of the target language speech acts into EFL curricula and classrooms can be very advantageous for students to improve their pragmatic competence (Baradovi-Harlig, 1999; Kasper, 1997). However, as EFL teachers, we still focus on teaching linguistic competence rather than pragmatic or communicative competence; as a result, a lot of Iranian EFL learners usually face serious problems whenever engage in like or real communicative setting because of their lack of sufficient pragmatic input.Based on the above mentioned view point, this paper was an attempt to investigate how programmed pedagogical sessions through video-driven prompts could lead to promoting the participants comprehension of the two target speech acts of apology and request. To this end, 33 intermediate EFL learners, female and male, with the age range of 17 to 24 studying English at Asman English Language Institute in Gorgan, Golestan Province, Iran, were selected as a homogenous sample through administration of an Oxford Quick Placement Test and then were randomly distributed into 3 groups as explicit, implicit and control groups. Request and apology strategies were taught to the three groups in different ways. While the control group received traditional instruction. The explicit and implicit groups received instruction through video-driven approach. They were exposed to 40 video vignettes extracted from different episodes of Flash Forward series for eight 45-minute sessions of instruction twice a week. A Multiple-Choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT),developed and validated by Arabmofrad (2014), was given to the participants right before and after the intervention as the pretest and the posttest. The results of running one way ANOVA paired samples t-test, and post-hoc That is, there was a meaningful difference between explicit group, implicit group and control group. The obtained results also revealed noticeable development in the participants performance of the two speech acts in the posttest in all three groups, but to different degree. This suggests the necessity of incorporating authentic materials in the classroom instruction of pragmatics.

Keywords:

Explicit Intervention , Implicit Intervention , Pragmatic , Speech Act of Apology , Speech Act of Request