Heliyon (Jun 2024)
Advancing English as second language communication: The effectiveness of online pragmatic training on essential speech acts
Abstract
The development of pragmatic competence is crucial for enhancing learners' ability to communicate more effectively in English in various cultural and social contexts. Numerous studies have explored the impact of implicit and/or explicit training on language learners' pragmatic development. However, the scarcity of online pragmatic training has motivated this research. To this end, a randomized experimental study was conducted to determine whether online pragmatic treatment could enhance students' pragmatic competence and to identify which procedure, explicit or implicit, is more effective. Sixty university students were randomly assigned to three groups of 20: two experimental groups (implicit and explicit) and one control group. ‘Google Meet’ was used for online training. All three groups were given a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) as a pre-test featuring 12 different scenarios, three for each of four speech acts. At the end of the treatment, the participants of the experimental and control groups received the same DCT as a post-test. The findings revealed that the participants of the experimental groups improved their pragmatic competence compared to the pre-test and post-test results of the control group. Although there is a difference between the implicit and explicit groups' post-test results, the difference is not statistically significant. Still, according to Cohen's d effect size, the effect size of the explicit group (1.5) is larger than that of the implicit group (1.1). According to the results of the study, it can be said that pragmatic training contributes to the effective use of the target language for communicative purposes.
