The Interactive Effects of Pragmatic‐Eliciting Tasks and Pragmatic Instruction

Abstract

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and implicit). Forty-nine Spanish learners of English engaged in these two tasks as pre-and posttests. The explicit group received 12 hours of metapragmatic information on head acts and hedges in suggestions while the implicit group was the recipient of recast and input enhancement activities. The results showed that postinstructional improvement of the explicit condition was significantly more than that of the implicit condition in the phone task, although improvements of these two conditions were on par in the e-mail task. This task-induced variability might have been causedby an interaction between the feature of the two types of knowledge (i.e., monitoring capability) and an access to the knowledge bases (i.e., the role of attention to appropriateness and accuracy) in the two tasks.

Effects of Instruction on Adolescent Beginners’ Acquisition of Request Modification

“…Moreover, these studies were overwhelmingly focused on adult learners in university settings, with the exception of Lyster (), who examined Grade 8 students. All these studies have pointed to the effectiveness of explicit instruction, but the results with regard to the effects of implicit instruction are inconclusive (Fukuya & Clark, ; Fukuya & Martinez‐Flor, ; Fukuya & Zhang, ; see also Jeon & Kaya, , for a meta‐analysis of such research). More research is needed to address the relative effectiveness of different implicit techniques or the comparative effectiveness of explicit versus implicit techniques (Jeon & Kaya, ; Kasper, ).…”

“…The instructional techniques examined in previous studies “often lean toward the explicit end of the explicit‐implicit continuum” (Jeon & Kaya, , p. 193), in that both explicit and implicit conditions featured some form of consciousness‐raising (CR). The explicit condition was always operationalized as explicit rule explanation, but sometimes included other CR tasks, such as students’ discussion about appropriate use of the target form (Lyster, ; Tateyama et al, ), metapragmatic feedback (Alcón, ; Olshtain & Cohen, ; Yoshimi, ), explicit direction of learners’ attention to the target form (Fukuya & Martinez‐Flor, ), or visual enhancement (Fukuya & Clark, ). The implicit condition was always operationalized as an exclusion of rule explanation with such CR tasks as visual enhancement (Alcón, ; Fukuya & Clark, ; Fukuya & Martinez‐Flor, ), recasting (Fukuya & Zhang, ) and prompting learners to pay attention to the target form (Tateyama, ) or to search for the rules (Kubota, ).…”

Teachability and bilingualism effects on third language learners' pragmatic knowledge

“…To answer this question, and as suggested by Hama & Leow (2010), further research is needed to explore the effect of pragmatic instruction, employing both online and offline measurement tasks. Similarly, the interactive effects of eliciting tasks and pragmatic instruction need to be further addressed (Fukuya & Martínez-Flor, 2008).…”

Focusing on Speech Acts to Understand and Teach Pragmatics in Language Instruction

“…Making pragmatics part of school programs will ensure that future English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers meet and assess the pragmatic-related needs of the ELLs population they will eventually encounter (Fukuya & Matínez-Flor, 2008 …”