The Effects Of Instruction On Chinese Adult EFL Learners' Acquisition Of English Requests

This study examines the effectiveness of instruction on Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English requests in the foreign language classroom setting within the framework of Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis and Bialystok's two-dimensional model of language processing. Specifically, the main purpose of the study is to attest whether the classroom instruction in the vocational education context really works at the pragmatic level and to what extent explicit and implicit instruction affect learners' knowledge and ability to use request strategies. For this purpose, a quantitative study was conducted with 104 participants who were freshmen from Electricity Engineering major at a college of higher vocational education.The three groups (explicit, implicit, and control) were from three intact A-level classes. During the instructional period of 14 weeks, the three groups were exposed to excerpt including requests taken from different episodes of the TV series Old Friends. However, the explicit group received instruction by means of awareness-raising tasks and metapragmatic explanation on the use of appropriate requests, while the implicit group was provided with enhancement of request strategies. There were four data elicitation measures employed in the experiment: a written discourse completion tests (WDCT) involving 8 situations from the 24 developed by Liu (2004); a multiple-choice discourse completion tests (MDCT); discourse-evaluation tests (DT); and a questionnaire of the pragmatic learning in the Chinese EFL classroom setting (QPL).The analysis of the collected data reveals that (a) learners' production and awareness of request-making improve in both the implicit group and the explicit group; (b) there are significant differences between the two instructional groups in fostering learners' ability to use appropriate requests; (c) input-output activities result in an effective acquisition of request in the learning context of vocational education. Although in vocational education background, the instruction takes effect actually.The present study focuses on exploring better methodologies to improve learners' ability in pragmatics. The results attest that authentic audiovisual input is useful to address the appropriate use of pragmatic knowledge (Rose, 2001). Thus, the present study offers implication for English teaching and learning in that learners should be provided with rich and contextually appropriate input and opportunities for output and feedback.