| Based on the cognitive processing theory and previous interlanguage pragmatic studies, a quasi-experimental study in the form of pretest-posttest with nonequivalent groups was conducted to explore the effect of pragmatic instruction, especially the effects of differential degrees of input enhancement in Chinese college English classes. The study examined the instruction of speech acts, focusing on request.The subjects were 98 sophomores, from four intact audio-visual-oral English classes at Southwest University. The four classes were randomly assigned into four groups: a control group (CG), a group treated with implicit instruction (IG), another treated with implicit instruction and input enhancement (IEG), and the other treated with explicit instruction and input enhancement (EEG). Two input enhancement techniques were employed: typographical enhancement and recasts. Data were collected through pre- and post-treatment MDCTs (Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Tasks).Participants in all the four groups had a similar pragmatic competence in making English requests before the treatment. However, after the treatment, all the three treatment groups performed significantly better in the posttest than they did in the pretest, whereas the control group did not. Besides, a further analysis showed that IG performed better than CG, and IEG outperformed IG with statistically significant differences in the posttest. Although EEG performed slightly better than IEG, there was no significant difference between them.Therefore, pragmatic instruction in college English classrooms is effective in the development of Chinese-speaking English learners' pragmatic competence, specifically, the appropriate use of request. The two input enhancement techniques play a positive role in improving the learners' pragmatic competence. The results of the experiment lead to the claim that the learner's attention to form at input decoding is a sufficient condition for language acquisition.
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