The Effects Of Explicit Instruction On Vocational College Students' Acquisition Of English Refusals

Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) has aroused many linguists'interest over the past three decades. Research into ILP has often focused on speech act production. Refusal is one of the speech acts that frequently occur in daily communication, which means saying no to an invitation, offer, request or suggestion. This speech act has attracted many researchers'attention due to the face-threatening nature it entails. Refusal is a complex task for non-native speakers (NNSs) since it may cause pragmatic failure as a result of their limited linguistic proficiency in second language (L2) or a lack of L2 socio-cultural knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to raise L2 learners'pragmatic awareness and promote their pragmatic competence through the instruction of refusal strategies in the foreign language (FL) contexts.This study adopts the model of explicit instruction of L2 pragmatics in FL classroom proposed by Dai Weidong and Yang Xianju (2005) to teach first-year college students how to use English refusals in a polite way. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of instruction on L2 pragmatic development by comparing the results in achievement from before and after the explicit instruction of Chinese students learning polite English refusals. Based on Schmidt's noticing hypothesis, the study attempts to answer the following questions. (1) Does learners' production of polite English refusals improve after the instruction of L2 pragmatics? (2) Does explicit instruction have an advantage over implicit instruction in improving learners' production of polite English refusals? (3) What are the differences of refusal strategies employed by the explicit group before and after the instruction?The present study was a quasi-experimental study with both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Two intact classes from a vocational college participated in this study. For 4 sessions throughout November in 2010, two groups received two types of instruction on English refusals respectively, namely an explicit instruction and an implicit instruction. The target of the instructions was of four types, i.e. refusals to invitations, offers, requests and suggestions. The instrument for the test was a written discourse completion test (DCT). Pretest and posttest were used to obtain the scores. The results of the test were analyzed and compared with Statistic Package for the Social Science (SPSS 17.0).The findings revealed that:(1) both the explicit group and the implicit group had post-instructional improvements in their production of English refusals; (2) the explicit group yielded better results than the implicit group; (3) the explicit group had a better production of English refusals after the instruction. First, they used target strategies increasingly in the posttest and the contents of their refusals improved greatly. Second, they were able to use some non-target strategies after the instruction. They were also found to use less direct strategies (particularly, "no" strategy) after the instruction. Finally, they were able to take the social status into consideration when refusing others, which was the evidence that the explicit instruction improved learners' sociopragmatic competence as well as their pragmalinguistic competence.From the above findings, I conclude that the explicit instruction has enhanced the learners'pragmatic ability of performing the speech act of refusal. Finally I provide some implications for English teaching and future research.