Developing pragmatic awareness of suggestions in the EFL classroom: A focus on instructional effects

Abstract

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.