The Development Of Pragmatic Competence And Explicit Instruction-An Experiment Of English Request Strategies

A quasi-experimental study of classroom-based pragmatic instruction is conducted to investigate whether pragmatic competence of Chinese learners of English can be promoted under the condition of explicit teaching. From the perspective of speech acts, the present study takes English request realization strategies as its instructional targets. Therefore, the research question is "Can English learners' pragmatic competence be promoted through explicit pragmatic instruction within the context of FL classrooms?", which leads us to put forward two hypotheses:Hypothesis 1: The experimental group will produce significantly more useof request strategy types on the posttest than on the pretest, but the controlgroup will not.Hypothesis 2: The experimental group will produce significantly more useof request strategy types than the control group on the posttest.The thesis consists of six interrelated chapters.Chapter One, Introduction, introduces the current state of English learners' communicative competence in China—low communicative competence, especially low pragmatic competence—through enumerating five common phenomena. Next, it examines the five phenomena, especially the phenomenon of "pragmatic failure" in detail, and points out learners' lack of the basic and necessary pragmatic competence. Finally, it states the research purpose and significance.Chapter Two, Research Background, presents the research background of the present study. Firstly, considering pragmatic learning as one of heated research focuses in interlanguage pragmatics research, the author displays an overview of interlanguage pragmatics on its definition and research foci. Secondly, by tracing back to the development of "communicative competence" from Hymes (1972), to Canale & Swain (1980), and then to Bachman (1990), the historical development of "pragmatic competence" is described and then defined. Finally, the speech act of requests is introduced through offering its definition, segmentation and realization strategies.Chapter Three, Literature Review, reviews those interventional studies into pragmatic instruction both abroad and at home. Based on Kasper's (2001) summary of those interventional studies abroad, 21 interventional studies are described. Generally, these studies suggest that SL/FL pragmatics is teachable; that learners who receive instruction do better than those who do not; and the general trend is in support of explicit instruction. In contrast, little interventional research has been done in China except for Hu Meixin's (2004) experimental pragmatic instruction, whose research results suggest that explicit teaching cannot facilitate participants' pragmatic development in terms of speech acts. Finally, two interventional studies, Takahashi's (2001) & Alcon's (2005), are examined in detail, for their teaching targets are the same as that of the present study, namely, English request realization strategies. Their research results suggest that explicit pragmatic instruction contributes to foreign language learners' pragmatic learning.Chapter Four, Explicit Pragmatic Instruction, addresses the issues of the research design. The present study adopts a pretest-posttest design. Ninety-eight English-majored juniors from two natural classes at Xihua University are assigned to two groups—the experimental group and the control group—after controlling their length of English study and English proficiency. Both groups are required to learn how to adopt request strategies to modify requests in a given context through watching films. Students in the control group are only asked to pay special attention to those requests appeared in the films. In contrast, students in the experimental group receive explicit pragmatic instruction on the target forms, which falls into five periods (i.e. Feeling phase, Doing phase, Thinking phase, Understanding phase, and Using phase). That is to say, they receive not only instruction through direct awareness-raising tasks and written metapragmatic feedback on the realization of pragmatically appropriate English requests, but also get lots of opportunities to practice the target forms.Chapter Five, Data Analyses and Discussion, analyzes the experimental data of both groups on the pretest and posttest according to the sequence of the two hypotheses. As for Hypothesis 1, the results from the paired-samples t-test for comparing each group's pragmatic performance on the pretest and posttest show that students in the experimental group do better on the posttest than on the pretest, whereas students in the control group do not. As for Hypothesis 2, the results from the independent-samples t-test for comparing both groups' pragmatic performance on the posttest illustrate that students in the experimental group do better than those in the control group on the posttest. Therefore, in line with the research results from most previous interventional studies abroad, explicit pragmatic instruction facilitates learners' pragmatic learning in terms of speech acts. Additionally, the research results from the present study provide evidence for supporting Schmidt's (1993) Noticing Hypothesis and Bialystok's (1993) Two-dimensional Model. Finally, the research findings are discussed from a psycholinguistic perspective by adopting Gass's (1988) model of SLA and Yin Demo's (2005) theory of Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Double Structures~2.Chapter Six, Conclusion, summarizes the research findings of the experiment and then points out some limitations and suggestions for future study.