Abstract-To achieve communicative competence, L2 learners' need to develop their pragmatic competence and this may be fostered with the help the learners receive from their teachers. This paper is an attempt to investigate the efficacy of explicit instruction of refusal at pragmatic level to four types of acts-invitations, suggestions, offers and requests. Adopting a pretest/posttest design as with treatment and control group, the two groups in this study were exposed to the treatment. Data collected by means of written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) as well as written self report suggest that the instructional approach resulted in gain in L2 pragmatic ability of the experimental group. The delayed posttest used in the study confirmed the findings. The findings may contribute to the interlanguage pragmatic pedagogy, especially in the EFL context and suggest that meta-pragmatic information the L2 learners received through pedagogy may lead to learners' L2 pragmatic development.
PurposeMany scholars have recognized the cultural dependency of the concept of plagiarism and have investigated the influence of cultural attitude on university students' plagiarism; however, since the findings are inconsistent and because plagiarism is a major concern in academic institutions in Asia, we were motivated to examine the understanding and prevalence of plagiarism among Canadian and some Asian language students.Design/methodology/approachTo elicit the data, the questionnaire developed by Maxwell et al. (2008) was adapted for this study. The scale included three sections. In the initial section, the students' background information was inquired. Section two included 10 scenarios, all of which consisted of two levels; understanding and experience. Section three of the scale consisted of five open-ended questions. In fact, the questions intended to complement the survey findings. Finally, in the fourth section, five yes/no questions were asked. Because the respondents could evade answering some open-ended questions, we developed five questions with yes/no answers in order to probe deeper into the participants' answers.FindingsThe results showed significant differences among the participants concerning both understanding and prevalence of plagiarism. Most of the differences were between Canadian and Asian students in that Canadians had a higher level of understanding. They also enjoyed a lower rate of incidence of plagiarism. Nevertheless, further analyses revealed that the students' academic misconduct is probably influenced by other factors including lack of proper education rather than cultural differences.Social implicationsThe findings lead us to argue that cultural differences may not be the main source of the prevalence of plagiarism across nations and that Asian language university students plagiarize mainly due to a lack of understanding of the principles of plagiarism. Therefore, Asian universities should take measures to make sure that they promote language students' understanding regarding the misconduct.Originality/valueApart from a few studies, no other study has scrutinized plagiarism across cultures. As such, our study attempted to shed more light on the student, especially language students' plagiarism across different nations.
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