The Effect Of Explicit/Implicit Instruction On The Development Of Chinese EFL Learners' Pragmatic Competence In English Requests

In recent years, more and more researches in the field of interlanguage pragmatics have moved into studying learners'development of pragmatic competence in foreign language classrooms. Most of them have proved the positive effect of instruction on learners'pragmatic competence, however, the long-term effect of instruction are rather controversial until now (Lyster, 1994; Liddicoat and Crozet, 2001; Takimoto, 2006). It is important to be aware that a great number of empirical studies have focused on the development of learners'pragmatic competence, but only few of them are conducted under the circumstances of China and targeted Chinese EFL learners, who are quite fragile in pragmatic competence.Therefore the study reported in this dissertation aims to investigate the effect of explicit and implicit instruction on improving Chinese EFL learners'pragmatic awareness and the pragmatic appropriateness of their production of English requests, which are the two indices used to measure pragmatic competence. Based on Schmidt's (1993) Noticing Hypothesis and Bialystok's (1993) Two-dimensional Model, our study attempts to answer four research questions: (a) Do learners'pragmatic awareness and the pragmatic appropriateness of their production of English requests improve after instruction? (b) Does explicit instruction have an advantage over implicit instruction in improving learners'pragmatic awareness and the pragmatic appropriateness of their production of English requests? (c) Do both explicit instruction and implicit instruction have long-term effect on learners'pragmatic awareness and the pragmatic appropriateness of their production of requests? (d) Does explicit instruction have an advantage over implicit instruction in its long-term effect on learners'pragmatic awareness and the pragmatic appropriateness of their production of requests?Seventy-one junior college students from three intact classes were randomly assigned to three groups (explicit group, implicit group and control group). The three groups were exposed to the same film clips from the TV series Friends. However, the explicit group received explicit metapragmatic rules, and practiced them through direct consciousness-raising task, and then received metapragmatic feedback. While, the implicit group was provided with a combination of implicit techniques comprising typographical enhancement and indirect consciousness-raising task, then provided with implicit feedback without metapragmatic information. Results from the study indicate that: (a) Learners who received instruction, explicit or implicit, at least temporarily outperformed those who didn't; (b) In the short run learners'awareness of requests equally benefited from both explicit instruction and implicit instruction, but the pragmatic appropriateness of their production benefited more from explicit instruction; and (c) The positive effect of instruction maintained in the long run and; (d) The explicit group gained an advantage over the implicit one in terms of their pragmatic awareness and the pragmatic appropriateness of their production.