The Effect of Different Types of Instruction and Feedback on the Development of Pragmatic Proficiency:The Case of Pragmatic Markers

The necessity of conducting more studies addressing the development of pragmaticprofciency and strong pragmatic awareness for English language learners hasmade the role of instruction and feedback in teaching pragmatic knowledge ofutmost importance. The present study evaluates the relative effectiveness of fourtypes of instruction for teaching some pragmatic markers including topic changemarkers, mitigation markers, interjections and hybrid basic markers to 75advanced Iranian learners of English: explicit instruction only, explicit instructionwith metalinguistic feedback, structured input instruction only, and structured inputinstruction with metalinguistic feedback. Treatment group performance wascompared with control group performance on pre-tests, post-tests and follow-uptests that contained an open-ended discourse completion test and a multiple-choicepragmatic listening comprehension test. The results of the data analysis revealedthat students› ability to comprehend and produce pragmatic markers improvedsignificantly in treatment groups and that pragmatic interlanguage is permeableto instruction in EFL settings. However, there were statistically significantdifferences among the four treatment groups regarding awareness of differentpragmatic markers and their appropriate use. These findings give us some usefulinsight on the teachability of pragmatic markers and the role of instruction andfeedback in the classroom to develop pragmatic competence of EFL learners.

کلیدواژه ها:

Pragmatic proficiency ، Pragmatic markers ، Explicit instruction ، Structured input instruction ، Metalinguistic feedback