The Effects Of Explicit Instruction Versus Implicit Instruction On Efl Learners' Awareness And Learning Of Requests

The present study explores the effects of explicit instruction vs. implicit instruction on learners'awareness and their subsequent learning of the speech act of English requests under the information processing framework. The study was carried out among freshmen at Foreign Language School of Central South University. Three intact classes were randomly chosen and assigned to two experimental groups and a control group:the explicit instruction group received written metapragmatic explanation on the request strategies and the influence of social factors on the choice of requests; the implicit instruction group received input where request forms and sociopragmatic information were visually enhanced; and the control group only participated in the pretest and posttest. Pragmatic development in requests was measured by the written discourse completion test which was implemented as a pretest and a posttest. Two levels of awareness were distinguished and measured: awareness at the level of noticing was measured by the on-line note-taking and awareness at the level of understanding was measured by an off-line assessment task.Results show that explicit instruction is more effective than implicit instruction in leading to noticing of conventionally indirect requests. However, noticing in both groups is low, indicating that noticing is constrained by a host of other factors in addition to instruction, such as the familiarity with the input and the relevance of the input. Explicit instruction is also found to be more effective than implicit instruction in leading to understanding of the sociopragmatic rules. With regard to pragmalinguistic learning, neither explicit instruction nor implicit instruction leads to any significant increases in the accurate use of the target request forms. The reason lies in that learners have already finished the task of expanding the repertoire of request realization patterns. Besides, the use of requests is constrained by social factors. For those learners, instruction should focus on sociopragmatic development, because the high pragmalinguistic proficiency does not guarantee a high level of sociopragmatic competence. Results show that explicit instruction is effective in sociopragmatic development, whereas implicit instruction does not produce significant effect. The advantage evidenced by the explicit instruction is due to the fact that it is more effective than implicit instruction in leading to understanding, which is found to positively correlate with sociopragmatic learning.