Developing pragmatic awareness of suggestions in the EFL classroom: A focus on instructional effects
Resumen
The role of instruction to develop learners’ pragmatic competence in both second and foreign language contexts has recently motivated a great deal of research. However, most of this research has adopted an explicit instructional approach with only a few studies attempting to operationalise a more implicit condition for pragmatic learning. In order to further explore how both explicit and implicit treatments can be operationalised, the aim of this study is to ascertain the instructional effects of these two types of teaching conditions on learners’ pragmatic awareness of suggestions. The participants consisted of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) distributed into three intact classes: group A (n = 24) worked on awareness-raising and production tasks receiving explicit metapragmatic explanations on suggestions; group B (n = 25) was taught the use of suggestions by means of input enhancement and recast techniques; and group C (n = 32) was a control group that did not receive any instruction on suggestions. The study adopted a pre-test and a post-test design to measure the effects of instruction on participants’ awareness of suggestions. Results from our analysis showed the positive effects of instruction on learners’ pragmatic awareness of suggestions. In addition, our findings illustrate the benefits of both explicit and more implicit instructional approaches to developing learners’ pragmatic awareness in the EFL classroom.
Cómo citar
Número
Sección
Licencia
Authors who publish with The Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics (CJAL) agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the CJAL right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/> that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in the CJAL.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the CJAL's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in the CJAL.
- Authors will not simultaneously submit the same piece of work for possible publication to more than one academic journal at a time.