The Effects Of Problem-solving Task On Chinese College Students' Acquisition Of The Speech Act Of Request

With the deepening of the reform of College English Curriculum in China,English teaching has gradually shifted its focus from linguistic competence to pragmatic competence,and more attention has been paid to pragmatic instruction gradually.However,due to the fact that the exposure of pragmatic instruction is relatively inadequate in college classrooms,college students' pragmatic competence still needs to be further improved,especially in speech acts.Although there are related research on speech acts in pragmatic instruction,few of domestic studies are conducted taking problem-solving task(PST)as the independent variable.On the basis of Noticing Hypothesis,Cooperative Learning and Output Hypothesis,the research aims to attest the effects of PST on Chinese college students' acquisition of the speech act of request.Two research questions are put forward:1)What are the effects of PST on Chinese college English learners'acquisition of request-making?2)What are the effects of PST on their retention of producing the speech act of request?The performances of the experimental group and the control group were compared on the immediate post test and the delayed post test by a written discourse completion tests(WDCT).SPPS 18.0 was applied to analyze and compare the results of two groups by Independent sample t test and Paired sample t test.Two findings yielded from the study are presented:1)In the immediate post test,the experimental group performs better than the control group,and there is significant difference between two groups.(sig=0.017<0.05);2)In the delayed post test,the experimental group still does better than the control group,and there is no significant difference of the scores between two groups.(sig=0.057>0.05).The above findings indicate that PST is effective in the acquisition of Chinese college students' request-making as well as the retention of its long-term memory when compared to the control group.However,it is shown that the influence of PST on the students' retention of producing request is subtle.The research discusses the effects of PST on learners' acquisition of request,which provides effective pedagogical implications for those researchers who are interested in pragmatic instruction.