Doğrudan Edimbilim Eğitiminin İlköğretim Öğrencilerinin Edimbilimsel Gelişimi Üzerindeki Etkileri

Abstract

A large body of literature has examined the role of explicit teaching on L2 pragmatics. Previous research findings confirmed that explicit teaching has a positive impact on the development of L2 learners' pragmatic competence. Many studies attempt to explore the efficacy of instruction in improving pragmatics competence in terms of learners' speech acts of requesting. However, little attention has been focused on teaching request strategies to young learners. This study aims to investigate whether explicit instruction of request strategies may enhance the young learners' L2 pragmatic awareness and whether there will be an increase on the learners' awareness based on social power, distance, and imposition factors. Twenty-two second-grade Turkish students from a private school participate in the study. The participants are divided into experimental and control groups and each group consists of eleven students. The experimental group receives four hours of treatment in two weeks while the control group follows conventional instructions without any metapragmatic teaching on requesting strategies. The quantitative data is gathered by administering Discourse Completion Test (DCT) as both the pre and the post-tests. To increase the reliability and validity of the research results, the triangulation method is used. For triangulation, the teacher-researchers employ teacher observation with a rubric and semi-structured interview is conducted with purposefully chosen students. The results of quantitative analysis showed that there is no significant difference in learners' pragmatic awareness on L2 requesting. However, according to the qualitative results, there is a noticeable difference in the learners' pragmatic awareness on requests and pragmatic factors.