Although politeness markers are frequently used in written and spoken communication, pragmatic studies have not sufficiently explored the instruction of such markers to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who lack sufficient opportunity to communicate with native speakers to acquire them in the context of use. Ignoring politeness as a subject of instruction could be due to the hypothesis that politeness is ingrained in the culture of its use and hence cannot be taught to EFL learners. To investigate this hypothesis, politeness markers proposed by House and Kasper (1981) in their politeness framework were used as the point of departure to teach these markers to two groups of EFL students using film-driven input-enhancement tasks and output tasks. The results of the study revealed the beneficial effect of teaching politeness markers through the two tasks. Whereas the input-enhancement group improved significantly in their comprehension of politeness markers, the output group manifested more gains in their production of these markers. Findings from this study have implications for interlanguage pragmatic instruction, suggesting that politeness is teachable and that different instructional tasks bring about different effects on the production and comprehension of politeness markers.
Critical thinking ability is a difficult concept to define. It involves reasoning and active consideration of what is received rather than a forthright acceptance of the ideas. It has been argued that when the focus of testing is the examination itself, the critical thinking ability of the learners cannot be boosted. However, different types and formats of tests can engage the learners in an active critical thinking when they are appropriately prepared. In this paper some of these tests used in the literature and the way they engage the learners in critical thinking activities are explained. The paper concludes that different tests of language can be manipulated so that they can engage the learners in critical thinking activities. Implications for teachers and test developers are also provided.
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