The Development Of Pragmatic Competence In Explicit And Implicit Instructions: A Case Study On Vocational Students

Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) is a sub-discipline of cross-cultural pragmatics and second language acquisition research. To be exact, interlanguage pragmatics studies the way nonnative speakers (NNSs) understand and carry out linguistic actions in a target language, and how they acquire L2 pragmatic knowledge. In a narrow sense, it refers to the investigation of nonnative speakers'comprehension and production of speech acts, and the acquisition of L2-related speech act knowledge. There are a rapidly growing number of classroom researches of interlanguage pragmatics abroad .However, at home the majority of available researches study either a specific speech act or are observational classroom studies. Few researches (Hu, 2004) study interlanguage pragmatics in a way of longitudinal experiment. Furthermore, researches on the students'interlanguage pragmatic competence have focused on learners other than vocational college students.From an interventional instruction perspective, this paper focuses on the development of interlanguage pragmatic competence of Chinese vocational college students and explores the efficacy of different instructional strategies at the interlanguage pragmatic level. Specifically, the main purpose of the study is to investigate to what extent the two instructional approaches– explicit instruction versus implicit instruction– affect learners'awareness, knowledge and ability to use request strategies. The speech act of request is among the most well represented in the pragmatics literature and is also included in the English language syllabus for vocational college students in China. Two intact classes are chosen from Hebei Vocational and Professional College of Building Materials, including 73 students. The two groups are designed for the purpose of study as Explicit Group and Implicit Group. Explicit Group receive explicit instruction and Implicit Group receive implicit instruction. A pretest and a posttest are conducted for measurement with the two groups. Teaching materials which are supposed to serve the research purpose are excerpts from some American comedies or movies, such as Friends and Keeping Mum. However, the two groups are exposed to different teaching strategies: the explicit group is instructed with metapragmatic information on the use of appropriate requests, while the implicit group is not.The findings of the study indicate that learners'awareness and pragmatic ability of requests benefit from both explicit and implicit instructions. Furthermore, in line with previous researches, my study reveals that, the explicit group, accompanying the fact that an improvement in learners'appropriate use of requests does take place after classroom instruction in both groups shows an advantage over the implicit one. The empirical study provides some insight into interlanguage pragmatic pedagogy and presents potentials for future research.