چکیده:
Despite the general findings that address the positive contribution of teaching pragmatic features to interlanguage pragmatic development, the question as to the most effective method is far from being resolved. Moreover, the potential of literature as a means of introducing learners into the social practices and norms of the target culture, which underlie the pragmatic competence, has not been fully explored. This study, then, set out to investigate the possible contribution of plays, as a medium of instruction, to the pragmatic development through either explicit or implicit mode of instruction. To this end, 80 English-major university students were assigned to four experimental groups: two literary and two nonliterary groups. One of the literary groups (Implicit Play) received typographically enhanced plays containing the speech acts of apology, request, and refusal and the other (Explicit Play) received the same treatment in addition to the metapragmatic instruction on the acts. The medium of instruction for the nonliterary groups were dialogs containing the given functions; they were also given either enhanced input (Implicit Dialog) or input plus metapragmatic information (Explicit Dialog). Analyses of the four groups’ performance on a Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) before and after the treatment did not show any advantage for the literary medium, i.e., there was no significant difference between literary and nonliterary groups. It was rather the mode of instruction that mattered most, where explicit groups outperformed their implicit counterparts. These findings indicate that even though implicit teaching, that is, exposure to enhanced input followed by some awareness-raising tasks, is effective in pragmatic development, it cannot contribute so much to learning as can the explicit instruction
خلاصه ماشینی:
"These findings indicate that even though implicit teaching, that is, exposure to enhanced input followed by some awareness-raising tasks, is effective in pragmatic development, it cannot contribute so much to learning as can the explicit instruction.
Accordingly, the present study was aimed at exploring this potential of literature by examining the effect of both explicit and implicit modes of pragmatic instruction through the medium of play as a literary form.
Considering the fact that literature has a lot to offer in terms of cultural (Allington & Swann, 2009; Kim 2004) and linguistic knowledge (Hanauer, 2001; Iida, 2012; Paesani, 2005) and that plays have a conversational structure (speech acts are mostly instantiated through conversational interactions), the present study investigated whether implicit or explicit instruction through plays had any effect on learners‟ pragmatic competence as indexed by their appropriate production of speech acts.
The one-way ANCOVA analysis of the performance of the groups on the WDCT pretest and posttest revealed that there was a significant difference among the four groups and hence a difference in the effect of methods (mode-medium blends) on the pragmatic development in terms of the production of the given speech acts.
The second research question, which related to the medium of instruction, was whether there was any significant difference in the production of speech acts between literary (play) and nonliterary (dialog) groups.
The one-way ANCOVA analysis of the performance of the groups on the WDCT pretest and posttest revealed that there was a significant difference between the explicit and implicit groups and hence a significant effect for the mode of presenting speech acts."