The Effects Of Online Interactions As A Resource On Pragmatic Awareness Development Of EFL Students

Together with a paradigm shift from structuralism to functionalism in linguistic studies, and the flyingdevelopment of pragmatics as well as the emergence of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP), the focus of researchvaries from learners linguistic competence to the comprehensive communicative competence. Pragmaticcompetence is an indispensable constituent of communicative competence, which should be based on thepragmatic awareness. Therefore, the issue on how to develop language learners pragmatic awareness hasaroused great attention in the field of language teaching research.The role of instruction to develop learner s pragmatic awareness in both second and foreign languagecontexts has recently motivated a great deal of researches. However, there are rare researches on pragmaticawareness development by using authentic data collected from the advice giving website, which not onlybroadens the research scope of advice giving, in an internet forum, but highlights once again the significance toinclude socio-pragmatics in language teaching in order to develop EFL students pragmatic awareness andsensitivity in giving advice.Based on Krashen s Input Hypothesis, Swain s Noticing Hypothesis and Brown and Levinson s PolitenessTheory, this study aims to explore the effects of online interactions as a resource on pragmatic awarenessdevelopment, which provides insights into differences in how native speakers of English and EFL studentsgiving advice within a specific genre. The participants consists of28learners of English as a foreign language(EFL) from the College of Foreign Languages and Literature in Northwest Normal University, who were askedto post their responses to the NetDoctor.co.uk on the topic of depression every three days in two monthsuninterruptedly, to different problem posts each time, which consists of296advice posts in total. They arerequired to submit their posts every half month,4times in all. Then, the data from the first time and the last timeare mainly analyzed to examine whether there are any differences with NSs and improvement of pragmaticawareness of advice giving during this progress.It was found that while NSs and EFL students employed a similar range of discursive moves, linguisticrealization strategies and politeness strategies when giving advice online, they differed significantly in thefrequency and distribution at the beginning of the experiment. After two month s online interactions andinfluence of NSs advice messages, the participants showed significant differences from the first time and the lasttime in the aspect of discursive moves, realization strategies and redressive forms of advice giving. Results fromthe analysis showed the positive effects of online interaction on learners pragmatic awareness of advice giving. Finally, based on the results of the present study, this paper provides some pedagogical implications whichare helpful to English teaching. By exploring the improvement of pragmatic awareness of EFL students duringthe authentic online interaction, the author highlights the importance of supplementing classroom materials withdata from naturally occurring interactions. Meanwhile, this paper points out some limitations of this study for thefurther research.