Developing Pragmatic Competence in an Instructed Setting: The Effectiveness of Pedagogical Intervention in Greek EFL Learners’ Request Production

Abstract

Using a short pedagogical intervention, a pretest-posttest design and baseline data (L1 English), the present study examined the effects of explicit instruction on the use of internal and external modification in requests among Greek Cypriot EFL learners. The findings revealed a complex picture with mixed results. Even though external modification showed some positive effects after the intervention, the study revealed no gains in relation to the overall use of internal modification as the learners' overall use of lexical/phrasal mitigators deviated even more from NS usage after the pedagogical treatment. We argue that, in relation to the learners' pragmalinguistic performance, the results seem to confirm the fact that surrounding factors such as the duration, quantity and quality of the pedagogical intervention play a complex role in accounting for such mixed findings. Results further showed that the way learners perceived social reality was not affected by the instructional treatment. Our findings suggest that learners' sociopragmatic development may not be as easily amenable to teaching as pragmalinguistic development. The development of L2 sociopragmatic awareness seems to need both longer explicit pedagogical instruction and rich exposure to the target language environment.

The Impact of Student-Paced Pragmatics Instruction through Nearpod on EFL Learners’ Request Performance

“…They appear to have stopped relying on their easily accessed automatized procedural knowledge of Turkish and to have begun automatizing their knowledge of English verbs (Anderson 1993;Saville-Troike 2012). Economidou-Kogetsidis et al (2018) emphasized the significance of instruction to develop learners' use of internal and external modifiers. Thus, the study also shed light on the internal and external modification strategies that the participants performed in the pre-test and the post-test.…”

“…Rose (2005) stated that a broad range of pragmatic features of the language was teachable. Even though some studies investigated the impact of pragmatics instruction on EFL learners' request modification (Tajeddin & Hosseinpur, 2014;Economidou-Kogetsidis et al, 2018;Kaivanpanah et al, 2020), there are no studies, to the knowledge of the authors, which have investigated the impact of self-paced computer-mediated instruction on the modification of learner requests.…”

Request strategies and modification devices as performed by Czech EFL learners: A focus on borrowing objects

“…This is further supported by solid evidence suggesting that explicit pragmatic teaching can have a positive effect on L2 learners' pragmatic awareness and competence (e.g. Takahashi 2001, Alcón Soler et al 2005, Economidou-Kogetsidis et al 2018. However, most English language course books at lower proficiency levels tend to rely on implicit teaching and present speech acts using a large number of examples that are appropriate in particular communicative situations.…”