The Effect of Consciousness-Raising Listening Prompts on the Development of the Speech Act of Apology in an Iranian EFL Context

Abstract

In line with the previous bodies of research, the present study in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) proved that some aspects of pragmatics were amenable to instruction even in foreign language (FL) contexts. However, there are still controversies over the best convenient teaching techniques and appropriate materials. Moreover, production-oriented approaches to teaching pragmatics caused scant practical studies over the perception of the frequent speech acts such as apology conducted to date. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relative effectiveness of consciousness-raising (C-R) listening prompts on the development of the speech act of apology on 64 (34 male and 30 female ranging in age from 17 to 27) upper-intermediate Persian learners of English who were randomly assigned to two groups of 32. While the experimental group took advantages of listening prompts with C-R or input enhancement activities, the control group received the same listening prompts without any C-R activities. The two groups were then exposed to 20 conversation extracts during 10 sessions of instruction including different apology situations taken from Interchange Series, Tactics for Listening Series, American Headway , and Top Notch . The results of the multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT) indicated that learners in the experimental group benefited more from C-R activities via listening prompts and outperformed the control group. In addition, the results revealed that male and female learners’ development in this pragmatic aspect of language did differ significantly. The findings throw light on practical as well as pedagogical implications of ILP and provide suggestions for English as a second language/English as a foreign language (ESL/EFL) teachers and materials developers.