| During the last few decades, language learning and teaching has gradually shifted its focus from improving learners’ linguistic competence to communicative competence. It also echoes the requirements in College English Curriculum Syllabus, which takes the communicative competence as the fundamental objectives for college English teaching. Pragmatic competence, as a well-established part of communicative competence, has aroused increasing attention in language learning and teaching in the past twenty years and so does the pragmatic failure. Pragmatic failures, a branch of pragmatics, unlike grammatical error, often interpreted as arrogance, impatience, rudeness, are not likely to be forgiven (Zhao 2005). Therefore, the lack of pragmatic knowledge or the awareness of performing appropriate utterances may give rise to communication breakdowns and eventually lead to misunderstandings or even failures.Research into pragmatic competence of adult foreign language learners indicates that learners pay more attention to develop grammatical competence while lacking corresponding focus on improving pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig 2001). In terms of the present pragmatic teaching in China, classroom learning remains to be the main source of exposure to students since English is a foreign language. It was also found that the teaching plans for pragmatics are far less than required and the exposure is quite inadequate in EFL classrooms. Moreover, there exists critical disparity of the pragmatic competences, especially in speech acts, between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers according to amounts of studies conducted in the context of China. Therefore, manifold researches have been conducted to seek for an efficient way to facilitate pragmatic learning and teaching. It is argued that the treatment of providing corrective feedback had notable effects on English learners in acquiring pragmatic knowledge. However, the researches on the effectiveness of specific kinds of corrective feedbacks in the pragmatic teaching context of EFL students in China are in great shortage. And since speech acts are the most frequent observed part in daily communications, this study takes the perspective from speech act of request, which is making requests and tries to look into the pedagogical suggestions for classroom teaching.The whole study takes Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt 1990,1995,2001), Interaction Hypothesis (Long 1981,1983,1996), Output Hypothesis (Swain 1985, 1995) as the theoretic background in that they serve as the supporter of the necessity to provide efficient corrective feedbacks in classroom interactions, triggering the modified output and thus help internalize the pragmatic knowledge. The present research attempts to examine whether corrective feedback (prompts and recasts) on making requests provided for EFL students in classrooms lead to students’ pragmatic performance improvement and whether there exist differences in the effectiveness of prompts and recasts.This study was conducted among 104 postgraduate students from Southeast University. They were divided into three groups (Control Group, Prompt Group and Recast Group) by their majors. The study adopted pretest-posttest design and all groups were designed to receive implicit instruction. Afterwards they were given time to practice role-plays with their partners and individually with the instructors. During the sessions for individual role-plays, the teacher gave focused recasts to the recast group (RG) and prompts to the prompt group (PG) whereas she did not provide any feedbacks to the control group (CG). Discourse completion test (DCT) and multiple choice test (MCT) were utilized in the pre-test, while in the post-test, questionnaires and the data of DCT were collected. With the help of SPSS 15.0, the data was analyzed qualitatively. Results indicate that 1) corrective feedback (prompts and recasts) on making requests provided for EFL students in classrooms lead to an improvement in the students’ pragmatic performance.2) there is no considerable difference in the effectiveness of prompts and recasts on EFL students’ pragmatic developments in making requests.It is suggested in the study that providing efficient corrective feedbacks in classroom interactions can help learners internalize pragmatic knowledge and the utilization of suitable corrective feedbacks combining the salient advantages of prompt and recast should be based on the practical condition in EFL classrooms in the context of China. The study tries to shed light on more practical and pedagogical implications on EFL classroom teaching of pragmatics. Also the reform on the teaching paradigm for pragmatics, especially for speech acts is in urgent need. |
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