The Effects Of Explicit Instruction On English Majors’ Acquisition Of Compliment Response Strategies

As Bardovi-Harlig(2003)argues,pragmatic competence can only be obtained through formal instruction since it cannot develop automatically in a Foreign Language(FL)setting.The results of studies with regard to the effects of instruction on the development of FL learners’ pragmatic competence have revealed that instruction is indeed helpful for the acquisition of pragmatic competence,especially the explicit instruction.However,the pragmatic teaching laying emphasis on cultivating FL learners’ communicative competence hasn’t received sufficient attention because of the test-oriented educational system in China.In addition,the domestic researches on pragmatics in the field of Second Language Acquisition(SLA)mostly concentrate on the comparison between the pragmatic features by FL learners and native speakers of Target Language(TL)when they conduct some specific speech acts,whereas empirical studies in terms of the acquisition of learners’ pragmatic competence are still limited.Therefore,the present study took compliment speech act as an example to explore the impact of explicit instruction on the acquisition of Compliment Response(CR)strategies by Chinese English majors.115 college students majoring in English took part in this study.They were randomly divided into two groups.The experimental group received explicit pragmatic instruction on compliment responses while the control group did not.This study adopted a pretest-posttest research design.The data were collected through a Written Discourse Completion Task(WDCT)with six scenarios concerning the topics of appearance,performance,and personality.According to the results,learners who received explicit instruction dramatically decreased their use of Accept strategy and increased Combination(CB)strategy at the macro level;more specifically,a decrease in Appreciation and an increase in Accept + Accept at the micro level.In contrast,the learners of the control group made little progress in their performance.The study sheds light on pragmatics learning in an English as an Foreign Language(EFL)setting and provides implications for pragmatics pedagogy.