The Effects of Implicit and Explicit Instruction on the Academic Interlanguage Pragmatic Knowledge of Iranian EFL Learners

Abstract

Pragmatic competence, as one of the main components of communicative competence, ought to be given sufficient attention by the foreign language instructors and students. Recently, a surge of interest in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has been witnessed. The studies on explicit and implicit instruction on Iranian EFL students’ production of two pragmatic aspects of apology and request have been few. Thus, the aim of this study was exploring the potentially facilitative impacts of explicit and implicit instruction on Iranian EFL students’ production of two pragmatic aspects frequently used in daily conversations, namely the speech acts of apology and request. For this purpose, forty homogenized upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners were randomly divided into one experimental and one control group. They took part in an English-medium conversation course which lasted for eight sessions in which ILP academic situations were presented to the students of the experimental group in the explicit way, while the control group received the same instruction and materials through the implicit method. Following the treatment, the participants received the same validated academic Multiple-Choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) of ILP. The results indicated that teaching pragmalinguistic features explicitly could improve the interlanguage pragmatic knowledge of the participants in the experimental group.

Keywords

• Implicit Instruction
• Explicit Instruction
• Interlanguage Pragmatic Knowledge