The Effects Of Pragmatic Instruction On Learners’Pragmatic Competence Of Apology

Only a limited number of classroom-based studies have explored the apology speech act at home and abroad so far. Based on Schmidt’s Noticing theory, the present paper adopted a pre-posttest control design to investigate the effect of pragmatic instruction on the development of pragmatic competence in terms of the apology speech act for220third-year English major students from an independent college in the southern part of China.This study is a classroom-based quasi-experiment. Three intact classes at the same level are arbitrarily assigned into an explicit group, an implicit group and a control group. The data of the apology speech act are collected by means of Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) and written self-report. Meanwhile, these data are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively and aims at answering the following two questions:1) Does pragmatic instruction have an effect on the learners’pragmatic competence in terms of the apology speech act?2) Are there any differential effects of instruction of explicit and implicit approaches to the learners’pragmatic competence concerning the apology speech act in the foreign language environment?This experiment lasted7weeks, consisting of a pretest, an experimental treatment, a posttest and a written self-report. By means of Liu Jianda’s (2006) questionnaire including12items of apology, all participants took part in the pretest and posttest by means of WDCT, which were carried out respectively before and after one week of the experimental treatment. The main teaching materials were selected from the following three sources:video excerpts of American TV series Ugly Betty, audio clips of role-play recordings and written extracts of WDCT from contemporary Chinese English learners. During the experiment, each group in the experimental groups was given four periods of treatment which lasts approximately30minutes each. The explicit group (N=73) received explicit metapragmatic explanation on apology, watched different scenarios with the target speech act and discussed its specific linguistic forms in terms of the factors that are behind specific contexts. During the classroom activities, the instructor offered all the teaching materials and provided positive feedback. The implicit group (N=74), on the other hand, participated in the same teaching program as the explicit group. However, the instructor offered the teaching materials with the bold form containing the target speech act and gave the negative feedback, but did not provide relevant information on metapragmatic explanation. A control group (N=73) received no treatment of apology speech act. One week after the posttest, a written self-report was collected from the two experimental groups (explicit group and implicit group) on the attitudes towards the present teaching and understanding of the apology speech act.Adopting SPSS, the data in the pretest and posttest were analyzed on the appropriateness of pragmatic for the three groups after the experiment. The results revealed that both of the experimental groups significantly improved the competence of English apology speech act in the posttest over the pretest; whereas the control group has shown no significant change, which demonstrates the positive effect on the effect of pragmatic instruction in the foreign language environment. On the other hand, the effects of explicit and implicit instruction on learners’acquisition of English speech act of apology were evident, but no significant differences existed between the two approaches.The study will shed light on the foreign language teaching. It is necessary to carry out pragmatic instruction and provide a wide range of meaningful input and a sufficient output and feedback for English learners in the foreign language instruction of independent college.