Effects of recasts of EFL learners' acquisition of pragmalinguistic conventions of request

The applicability of recasting to the pragmalinguistic level was the mission of this study. With its three research questions, this study investigated the effects of implicit feedback on Chinese learners of English in learning eight pragmalinguistic conventions of request: 1. Are pragmalinguistic recasts effective for teaching pragmatically appropriate requests? 2. Are they effective for teaching pragmatically appropriate and grammatically correct requests? 3. Do they boost learners’ confidence in making requests? Both pragmatic recast and control groups performed role-plays; the former received recasts on their request Head Acts whereas the latter did not. The results of discourse completion tests yielded the effect sizes of the pragmatic recast group: Cohen’s (1988) d = 0.83 for research question 1 and Cohen’s d = 0.87 for research question 2. Both groups also built up confidence in speaking to an interlocutor of higher status, perhaps due to the interaction with the instructor and their peers

The Interactive Effects of Pragmatic-Eliciting Tasks and Pragmatic Instruction

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and implicit). Forty-nine Spanish learners of English engaged in these two tasks as pre- and posttests. The explicit group received 12 hours of metapragmatic information on head acts and hedges in suggestions while the implicit group was the recipient of recast and input enhancement activities. The results showed that postinstructional improvement of the explicit condition was significantly more than that of the implicit condition in the phone task, although improvements of these two conditions were on par in the e-mail task. This task-induced variability might have been caused by an interaction between the feature of the two types of knowledge (i.e., monitoring capability) and an access to the knowledge bases (i.e., the role of attention to appropriateness and accuracy) in the two task

The Effects of Recasting on the Production of Pragmalinguistic Conventions of Request by Chinese Learners of English

This study examined the applicability of recasting to the acquisition of pragmatics. Specifically, this study investigated the effects of implicit feedback on Chinese learners of English in learning eight pragmalinguistic conventions of request. Both the pragmatic recast and control groups performed role-plays; the former received recasts on their request Head Acts (core requesting utterances), whereas the latter did not. Discourse completion tests showed that the pragmatic recast group performed better than the control group on measures of both pragmatic appropriateness and grammatical accuracy, with effect sizes of Cohen's (1998) d = 0.83 for pragmatic appropriateness and Cohen's d = 0.87 for pragmatic appropriateness and grammatical accuracy. The study highlighted the ways recasts can be implemented at the pragmatic level and demonstrated that pragmalinguistic recasting is a sound pedagogical option