The Effects Of Explicit Instruction On The Acquisition Of Speech Act Of Request

For a long time, studies on the speech act of request from various perspectives have been carried out by many scholars. Request is a particularly significant aspect of language in that much of what we do in our daily communication revolves around our desires to make other people do something. Based on the previous interventional studies on the speech act of request, this present study is designed to investigate the effectiveness of instructional experiment on the English majors'acquisition of the English speech act of request under the circumstance of China. This study aims to investigate the following research questions:Question 1: Do the participants'pragmatic awareness and the appropriate use of request strategies be promoted over the explicit instruction?Question 2: Does explicit instruction have an obvious advantage over the implicit instruction in improving the participants'pragmatic awareness and the appropriate use of request strategies?Question 3: Does the pragmatic instruction have long-term effect on the development of participants'pragmatic competence?This study can be divided into three stages: the pilot study, the interventional study, the post study. In the first stage, the questionnaire survey and interview are conducted to examine the present situation of the participants'acquisition of English speech act of requests, which paves the way for the second stage. In the second stage, this study presents the whole training sessions, and provides the result and discussion of the present interventional studies. In the last stage, the immediate post-test, the delayed post-test and interview after the experiment was conducted to explore the participants'attitudes towards the instructed pragmatic training and their achievements in class.The results from our study show that both explicit and implicit instruction can facilitate the participants'development of their pragmatic competence. That is to say, the participants in both instructional groups improved their pragmatic awareness and the appropriate use of request strategies. Secondly, the participants in the explicit group outperformed the participants in the implicit group. Finally, the present study proved that the pragmatic instruction have long-term effect on the development of participants'pragmatic competence in both instructional groups.