The Effects Of Explicit Instruction On EFL Learners' Use Of Apology Strategies

Based on speech act theory and politeness principle in pragmatics, and noticing hypothesis and output hypothesis in SLA theories, this study investigates whether explicit instruction may facilitate pragmatic production in the EFL classroom setting in China. Two types of explicit teaching approaches underlying teacher-centered and learner-centered strategies were compared regarding the effects on uses of apology strategies. One approach is teacher-centered strategy, which focuses on teacher's explanation of metapragmatic information and pragmatic rule (thereafter, teacher-explanation teaching), and the other is learner-centered model, which concentrates on learners' communicative activities and metapragmatic discussion (thereafter, awareness-raising teaching). The second explicit teaching model was provided by Dai Weidong and Yang Xianju (2005), and it consists of offering metapragmatic information, offering authentic context, offering communicative opportunities, and giving corrective feedback.Two questions are addressed in this study:1. Are explicit instructions effective for learners' production of apologies in China's setting?2. If they are, which approach is more effective?The present study adopted quasi-experimental method. Learners majoring in Business English in a higher-vocational college were chosen as our subjects. Their level of English is intermediate. They consist of three intact classes and were assigned to two experimental groups and one control group. Learners in one experimental group accepted awareness-raising teaching (AG); learners in the other experimental group accepted teacher explanation teaching (TG); learners in control group did not accept any pragmatic instruction (CG).The three groups were taught by the researcher, and they were exposed to the same teaching materials and four acts taken from instructional video Family Album USA. The experiment was done within two continuous class periods, and the total time of experimental instruction was 100 minutes. Pretest and posttest were administrated with multiple choice tests (MCTs) and written discourse completion tests (WDCTs), and the results of tests were analyzed and compared with SPSS.The results of the investigation showed that, in comparison to the control group, the two explicit groups improved their pragmatic competence significantly. It indicates that foreign language pedagogy which aims to provide learners with metapragmatic information may result in gains of learners' pragmatic competence whether learner-centered or teacher-centered teaching strategy is adopted. However, as for the two explicit groups' performance, no statistical differences were observed, that is, the teaching strategy mainly concentrating on learners' discussion and communicative activities was not more effective than the teacher- explanation teaching approach without any learners' activities.Focusing on foreign language in Chinese setting, the present study expands the scope of enquiry in the field of instruction of interlanguage pragmatics to a certain extent. By comparing two explicit instructional effects on pragmatic performance, the investigation tries to explore a pragmatic teaching model suitable for foreign language teaching in Chinese setting and gives some practical pedagogical implications. For instance, an English teacher can combine rule-explanation teaching approach with providing authentic settings to improve learners' pragmatic awareness.The present study consists of six chapters. The first chapter is introduction. The second chapter provides an overview of the theoretical framework on which our investigation is based, and examines studies of a specific speech act (i.e. apology). The third chapter presents pervious studies on pragmatic instruction, and discusses the advantage of explicit instruction on pragmatics in FL setting. The research questions and hypotheses are put forward in this chapter. The fourth chapter presents research method including experimental design and method for data analysis. The fifth chapter presents results and discussion. The last chapter includes the conclusion, pedagogical implications, limitations of the present and suggestions for further research.