Effects Of Explicit Instruction On EFL Learners' Pragmatic Competence Development

A quasi-experimental study of explicit pragmatic instruction was conducted toinvestigate in the context of explicit teaching IF and TO what extent nonnativelearners can improve their pragmatic performance;and meanwhile, IF and TO whatextent learner factors can have some effects on the outcome of the explicit teaching.The study adopted a speech act perspective. Request act and refusal act were chosenas the teaching targets.As the precedent researches of explicit pedagogical intervention, though allasserting to be explicit teaching, actually took some different teaching methodsexcept sharing one step of metapragmatic information presentation/discussion, thestudy made a proposal of five tentative guidelines for explicit teaching approach, anddesigned the present experimental teaching on the basis of them.55 freshmen participated in the study, with 32 of them in the experimentalgroup and 23 of them in the control group. The major data was collected throughpre-and post-treatment DCTs (discourse completion tasks). Using the nativespeakers' responses to the DCT questionnaires as the baselines, the study examinedthe overtime changes in the experimental group learners' pretest and posttestperformances and the cross-group differences between the performances of theexperimental group and the control group with the help of the software, SPSS 10.0.The results suggest significant effects of explicit teaching in expanding learners'TL (target language) pragmalinguistic repertoire, but limited effects in teaching TLsociopragmatics. A further comparison of the progress made by learners withdistinctions in integrative motivation, sociocultural identity, or grammaticalcompetence indicates that the limitations of the explicit teaching can be attributed tothe influences of the learner factors to a certain extent.