The Effect of Pragmatic Instruction on Developing Learners’ Use of Request Modifiers in the EFL Context

Abstract

The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of three teaching approaches: a deductive teaching approach, an inductive teaching approach, and an inductive-deductive teaching approach on facilitating Chinese EFL learners’ use of request modifiers. Written discourse completion tasks were employed to collect learners’ request data and a follow-up interview reported Chinese EFL learners’ overall positive attitudes towards pragmatic instruction with a preference for the deductive approach. The findings presented the necessity for instructions of request in EFL contexts and reveal the superiority of the inductive-deductive teaching approach on pragmatic knowledge. Combing the results of the experiment with learners’ perceptions, it indicates that practitioners should consider incorporating both deductive and inductive instructions to fit learners’ preferences of instructional styles and learning needs. Besides, in terms of learners’ pragmatic competence, such a teaching approach would also guarantee the treatment effect in both short and long runs.