The Interactive Effects of Pragmatic-Eliciting Tasks and Pragmatic Instruction

Abstract

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and implicit). Forty-nine Spanish learners of English engaged in these two tasks as pre- and posttests. The explicit group received 12 hours of metapragmatic information on head acts and hedges in suggestions while the implicit group was the recipient of recast and input enhancement activities. The results showed that postinstructional improvement of the explicit condition was significantly more than that of the implicit condition in the phone task, although improvements of these two conditions were on par in the e-mail task. This task-induced variability might have been caused by an interaction between the feature of the two types of knowledge (i.e., monitoring capability) and an access to the knowledge bases (i.e., the role of attention to appropriateness and accuracy) in the two tasks