An Empirical Study On The Learning Of Refusal Strategies Of Pragmatic Competence By Deductive And Inductive Approaches

One of the important targets of language teaching and learning is the improvement of communicative competence.Pragmatic competence is a significant part of the communicative competence,which is the key to improving language communicative competence.The speech acts of refusal and its corresponding strategies,which includes refusals to offers,refusals to suggestions,refusals to invitations,and refusals to requests,is a kind of speech act.Comparative studies of speech act of refusal between different groups have become really hot,but the study on the effectiveness and duration of refusal strategies teaching effects is comparatively few.The linguist,Masahiro Takimoto,believes that there still exists an argument on the relative effects of deductive and inductive approaches in current academia owing to limited studies exploring methodological issues such as unequal treatment lengths and different methods adopted for data collection.In order to testify the teaching effects of the two types of pedagogical interventions,the researchers need to conduct further studies.Therefore,the further research concerning the influence of these two teaching approaches on developing the second language pragmatic competence has its academic and social value.In this study,a six-week empirical research was employed.The subjects of this study were non-English-major freshmen(Grade 2017)from one vocational college.Three classes were respectively divided into deductive teaching group,inductive teaching group and control group,two of which received teaching intervention: the participants in deductive group received explicit meta-pragmatic explanations first,and then the instructor provided the exercises and examples to strengthen their pragmatic competence;whereas the participants in inductive group were provided with a combination of training materials and enhancement,and then meta-pragmatic rules were summed up under the guidance of the tutor;the control group worked as a comparative group.This paper answers the following three research issues to check whether there were significant differences for learners' ability of refusal strategies according to the results of WDCT drawn from the contrastive analysis of the pretest,the posttest,as well as the delayed posttest:1)Are there any significant differences on learner's performance of refusal strategies before and after the experiment in the classroom instruction context?2)Are there any differential effects between inductive and deductive approaches on the teaching of refusal strategies in the classroom instruction context?3)Are the teaching effects of inductive teaching and deductive teaching approaches on the pragmatic competence of refusal strategies sustainable in the foreign context?After research,the following conclusions were drawn:1)There were significant differences for EFL learners' production of refusal strategies before and after experiment between deductive(t=16.03,p=0.00)and inductive(t=13.53,p=0.00)classes.However,in control group,there were no significant differences(t=0.41,p=0.69),which identifies the effectiveness of pragmatic teaching,and the learners could benefit from the refusal strategies instruction;2)There were no significant differences(t=-0.25,p=0.48)between inductive teaching and deductive teaching in terms of refusal strategies.The research also showed that these two teaching approaches had their own advantages and disadvantages in terms of choice of strategies,amount of information,the level of formality and correct expression after the instruction;3)The post-instructional teaching effects of both deductive and inductive approaches were durable.As a result,the research result in the paper testifies that the teaching guidance can improve the learners' pragmatic competence(set refusal strategies as an example)to some extent,at the same time,once the refusal strategies is acquired,the learners' ability to refuse can maintain at a balanced level.