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Vol. 8. No. 2 A-2 September 2004

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The Effect of Explicit Metapragmatic Instruction on

the Speech Act Awareness of Advanced EFL Students
Zohreh Eslami-Rasekh
Texas A&M University
<zeslami tamu.edu>

Abbas Eslami-Rasekh
Isfahan University
<aeslami fgn.ui.ac.ir>

Azizollah Fatahi
Alame Tabatabaei University
<fazizollah yahoo.com>

Abstract

This study deals with the application of the pragmatics research to EFL teaching. The
study explored the effect of explicit metapragmatic instruction on the speech act
comprehension of advanced EFL students. The speech acts of requesting, apologizing,
and complaining were selected as the focus of teaching. Teacher-fronted discussions,
cooperative grouping, role plays, and other pragmatically oriented tasks were used to
promote the learning of the intended speech acts. A pretest-posttest control group
design was used. The subjects included Iranian undergraduate students in their last
year of study in the field of teaching English as a foreign language. A group of
American students were used to provide the baseline for the study. A multiple choice
pragmatic comprehension test was developed in several stages and used both as a
pretest and posttest to measure the effect of instruction on the pragmatic
comprehension of the students. The results of the data analysis revealed that students'
speech act comprehension improved significantly and that pragmatic competence is
not impervious to instruction even in EFL settings.

Introduction

Holmes and Brown (1987) offer the example of a male student who attempted to
compliment his teacher by saying, "You are wearing a very lovely dress. It fits you"
(p. 525). The teacher found this compliment from a young male student inappropriate.
However, research on language use shows that American speakers frequently
compliment on looks and clothes (Manes and Wolfson, 1981; Wolfson, 1989).
Textbooks also teach these types of compliments as one of the common ones used by
American speakers of English. How could this student have known then, that this
compliment may give unintended messages rather than showing his interest in using
the language? How can a learner figure out the norms of appropriateness for various
speech acts and different interlocutors in the target culture? [-1-]

Sharifian (2004, p. 119) offers the following example from an Iranian student:

An Iranian student at Shiraz University receives from her American lecturer the
recommendation letter that she has asked him to write for her and then turns to him
and says, "I'm ashamed." Bewildered by the student's response, the lecturer asks,
"What have you done?!!!"

This is an example of intercultural miscommunication from the use of a wrong

illocutionary force indicating device for thanking. The expression used would be more
appropriate when an offence is committed, rather than to show gratitude and
appreciation.

These are examples of pragmatic failure that L2 learners encounter when they are
involved in the act of communication. Trying to get the meaning across, they may
simply translate speech acts from their mother tongues to the second language.
Pragmatic failure, unlike grammatical errors, often passes unchecked by the teacher
or, worse, it is attributed to some other cause, such as rudeness. Examples like the
above instigate us to assume that we ought to teach the rules of appropriate language
use.

Several studies (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Boxer & Pickering, 1995; Bouton, 1996;
Kasper 1997) have shown that learners of high grammatical proficiency will not
necessarily possess comparable pragmatic competence. Even grammatically advanced
learners may use language inappropriately and show differences from target-language
pragmatic norms.

Bouton (1996) notes that the development of communicative competence should be

the goal of language teaching. He proposes three major directions that researchers can
take in order to further contribute to the theory of communicative competence: (1) the
refinement of the study of speech acts as they occur in different cultures, (2) an
investigation to determine the extent to which explicit instruction can increase the rate
at which nonnative speakers develop different factors of their pragmatic competence,
and (3) the contribution pragmatics can make to the presentation of different functions
of a language in textbooks designed for second language learners. This study makes
contribution in the second area, namely, effect of instruction on pragmatic
competence.

The aim of the present research is to show the possibility of teaching pragmatics in an
EFL setting with the assumption that this problem can be overcome by giving the
student the tools to make the processes of pragmatic decision-making explicit. It is
claimed that helping students to make the process of pragmatic decision making
explicit will help in successful communication and appropriate use of the second
language and will hopefully promote cross-cultural understanding and appreciation. [-
2-]

Background of the Study

This study is theoretically grounded in the area of Communicative competence,

Pragmatics, Speech Act Theory, Second Language Acquisition Theory, and
Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP).

Interlanguage Pragmatics is defined as the study of 'learners' use and acquisition of

linguistic action patterns in a second language (Bardovi-Harlig, 1996; Kasper, 1999;
Rose, 2000).

Although pragmatic performance studies make up a relatively large amount of

literature on interlanguage pragmatic, the literature on "interlanguage pragmatic
development" lags far behind (Kasper, 1999, Kasper & Rose, 1999). As Schmidt
(1993) puts it, "there has been little discussion of how pragmatic abilities are acquired
in a second language" (p. 21).

Rose (2000) mentions that there have been some cross-sectional studies (e.g., Siegal,
1994, 1996; Ellis, 1992; Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1993) and a few longitudinal
studies done recently which have investigated the effects of instruction on pragmatic
development over a period of time (Bouton, 1994; Billmayer, 1990, House 1996).
Schmidt (1993) for example has explored the role of "conscious awareness" in the
acquisition of pragmatic competence. He concludes that the necessary condition for
pragmatic learning to happen is attention to pragmatic information to be acquired.

Kasper (1999) distinguishes between "observational" and "interventionist" studies of

pragmatic ability within L2 classrooms. Observational studies focus primarily in
classroom processes, either without a view to learning outcomes or with learning
outcomes being analyzed as emerging in and through classroom interaction. Often but
not always, the observed classrooms are authentic in the sense of not being
specifically arranged for research purposes. Interventionist studies, on the other hand,
examine the effect of a particular instructional treatment on students' acquisition of
the targeted pragmatic feature.

According to Kasper (2001), opportunities for learning L2 pragmatics in foreign

language setting, compared to second language environment, are much more
restricted. Interventional studies (House, 1996; Wildner-Bassett, 1984, 1986) support
that by metapragmatic instruction and discussion, students can make significant gains
in pragmatic ability in FL classrooms. However more research needs to be done to
shed light on the kind of instructional measures that are most effective for EFL
contexts and other related issues to developmental pragmatics in impoverished L2
contexts.

Relying upon Long's (1996) and some other second language acquisition theorists,
Kasper (1999) holds that in purely meaning-oriented L2 use, learners may not detect
relevant input features, and that for achieving learners' noticing, input should be made
salient through "input enhancement." It is believed that input enhancement will raise
the learners' consciousness about the target feature. Input enhancement is defined by
Fukyua and Clark (1999) as an implicit instructional technique that provides no
metapragmatic information. However, Takahashi (2001) proposes a much broader
view of input enhancement. She distinguishes three different degrees and types of
input enhancement: explicit teaching, featuring metapragmatic explanation about
form-function relationships of the target structures; form-comparison, in which
students compare their own speech acts realizations with those of native speakers; and
form-search, in which students identify the target strategies in provided scenarios. [-
3-]

Most of the interventionist developmental studies with a focus on "input

enhancement" have a component proposing that the target pragmatic feature be
described, explained, or discussed and made as the object of metapragmatic treatment.
According to Kasper, metapragmatic instruction might be combined with
metapragmatic discussion with the active participation of students in various forms of
teacher-fronted-format, peer work, small groups, role-plays, semi-structured
interviews, introspective feedback, and metapragmatic assessment tasks. Some studies
(e.g., House, 1996; Tateyama et al., 1997; Pearson, 1998) have shed light on the issue
of metapragmatic instruction and compared it with other forms of instruction, like
"implicit teaching," and "practice conditions."

Kasper and Rose (2001) argue that effects of instruction on interlanguage pragmatic
development, especially in the L2 classroom, have been explored "far less." They go
on and add that classroom research has only played a minor role in interlanguage
pragmatics thus far. That is, different aspects of learning or teaching in L2 classroom
is still awaiting for further research. Finally, Kasper (1999) calls for classroom
research on pragmatics that combines process and produce perspectives.

In response to such calls by Kasper (1999) and Kasper and Rose (2001) this study
explores the effect of explicit metapragmatic instruction on the speech act
comprehension of advanced Iranian EFL students.

Methodology

Participants

All 66 Iranian EFL participants in this study were undergraduate students,

participating as members of intact classes. The two groups (one control and one
treatment) were fourth year students in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Isfahan
University in Iran majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. They thus
share basic demographic characteristics, such as L1, and field of study. Both male and
female students were among the participants and the age range was between 23 and
25. The EFL learners had studied English between 6 to 9 years, mainly through highly
controlled formal education in Iran. Baseline data for English were collected from
thirty American English speakers who were undergraduate students or had recently
graduated from university. Snow ball sampling was used to collect data from
American English speaking students. Most of the students were residing in California
at the time of data collection. The sample included both males and females and their
age range was between 21 and 30. All participants' approval was provided through
informed consent forms.
Materials

The study included a set of programmed instructional materials explaining the

realisation and interpretation patterns, rules, strategies, and tokens of the three speech
acts under study. Following Bardovi-Harlig's (1996) tentative 'speech acts
framework', the materials compiled started with presenting descriptions of the notions
of speech acts, levels of directness, and types and factors of variability. Speech acts
were explained in a "speech act set" format (Olshtain & Cohen, 1991). Each speech
act set encompassed the major sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic patterns and
strategies of interpreting and realizing one particular speech act at the "explicit,"
"conventional," and "implicit" or "indirect" levels (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984),
considering both "internal" and "external" modifications specified under the effects of
various situational, social, or cultural factors of variability. [-4-]

Procedures

Phase I. Test Construction. In order to develop the pragmatic awareness test a

discourse completion test (DCT) that measures pragmatic productive ability was first
developed. The DCT was used to provide the native English baseline data from native
speakers of English and also to use EFL learners' responses to find suitable distractors
for the multiple choice items. Twenty six situations which centered on a student's
family, social, and academic life were selected as the items of the production
questionnaire. The situations were student-life oriented in order to reflect subjects'
real-life experiences and to ensure naturalness of data as much as possible. The
situations represented variety of variables that reflect different social power and social
distance of the interlocutors.

The multiple-choice comprehension test was constructed on the basis of Farhady's

(1980) functional language testing. The production test employed had an open-ended
format and was made of 26 items each of which presented a situation where a certain
kind of speech act is expected. The situations centered around 3 kinds of speech acts
(requests, apologies, and complaints) which were the focus of this study.

The production test was administered to 25 EFL learners similar to the actual group of
the students in the main phase of the study and 30 American undergraduate students.
Therefore, building on the pilot-tested items of the "production test" employed in this
study, a multiple choice comprehension pragmatic test was developed to measure the
effectiveness of metapragmatic instruction on the pragmatic awareness of advanced
EFL learners. Each item had four choices. Only one of the four choices for each test
item was both sociopragmatically "appropriate" and pragmalinguistically "accurate"
and thus considered as the correct choice. The other three choices were intended as
"distractors" for the item.

The most frequent responses given by the NSs were used as the correct option for the
pragmatic awareness test and received 2 points. The other alternatives for each item
were picked out from the sociopragmatically inappropriate or the pragmalinguistically
inaccurate responses given by NNSs to the pragmatic production items. Two native
speakers were consulted to make sure about the inappropriateness or inaccurateness of
the distractors. In addition, the multiple choice pragmatic comprehension test was
administered to 20 American students to make sure the correct option and the
distractors are functioning as intended.

Phase II. Instruction. The scope of this study was limited to the request, apology,
and complaint speech acts. The rationales behind this selection was, firstly, the fact
that these speech acts are observed most frequently in daily communications of any
speaker and, thus, are worth paying attention in any needs analysis of L2 learners.
Secondly, these speech acts are the most empirically-explored speech acts in the
cross-cultural or interlanguage pragmatics literature and, as a result, could easily be
incorporated into explicit metapragmatic instruction.

Two groups of Isfahan University students participated in this phase of the study. The
students were in their eighth semester of English language study and on the verge of
graduation. The researcher randomly assigned one group as control group (32) and
the other one as experimental group (34). Also the "comprehension test" developed to
test the subjects' pragmatic awareness of speech act realisation patterns was
administered as a pretest to both groups. The activities and the extra focus on
pragmatic development activities in the experimental group were explained in the
syllabus of the course and considered as part of the course requirements. [-5-]

Then, the twelve-session explicit metapragmatic instruction, or the treatment, began

as follows. It should be mentioned that the pragmatic instruction took about 30
minutes of each 2 hour class period because the course instructors had their own
course teaching agenda to follow as well. The instruction was basically organized,
planned, scheduled, and given to the subjects either by researchers or by MA students
under the supervision of the researchers. The explicit metaprgamatic instructional
activities included description, explanation, teacher-fronted discussion, small-group
discussions, role plays, pragmatically focused tasks, and introspective feedback. The
different instructional activities used are listed below:

1. The explicit metapragmatic instruction for the experimental groups began by a

teacher-fronted discussion of various meanings a single utterance might
convey in different contexts (e.g., "it is hot in here"). Examples were provided
of different speech acts emphasizing the fact that a specific form can have
several functions in the language and one function can be realized through
different forms depending on contextual variables.
2. After teacher fronted discussion students were divided into different groups
and asked to come up with examples of the target speech acts (e.g., requests)
in their L1 and L2 and to discuss the differences and similarities in the
realization patters of the speech acts in L1 and L2.
3. Student volunteers wee asked to do role play of the intended speech acts for
the whole class.
4. Frequent sociopragmatic or paralinguistic deviations observed in students
examples were taken as teaching points and pertinent metapragmatic
information or comments on the intended speech act set was provided to the
whole class. Necessary reference was made to the instructional materials
students had in order to further establish and internalize the relevant
metapragmatic knowledge for any pattern and strategies of the intended
speech act. The materials, as mentioned before, were prepared by the
researchers based on the available literature on the intended speech acts.
 5. A discourse completion task like the following was provided to the groups to
come up with a speech act appropriate to the situation and to compare their
strategies with other members in their group.

You have lent your notes to a classmate a couple of weeks ago. Now you need
them yourself, so you go to him/her and say:

Your friend wants you to fill out a questionnaire for his/her research. You
want to take it home, so you say:

6. Students were then provided with dialogues in English and asked to extract the
intended speech acts performed by native speakers in those dialogues and to
compare it with their own strategies.

In the control group classrooms, no explicit metapragmatic instruction was given. The
students were just taught in accordance with the usual instructional programs of the
university. The dialogues were read out loud to them without any explicit
metapragmatic instruction.

After the completion of the 12-week period, the multiple choice pragmatic awareness
test was administered to the participants.

Design of the Study

The impracticalities involved in planning True Experimental designs for conducting

research in the field of Applied Linguistics in any setting, are overwhelming. Because
of practical limitations, a true random sampling was not possible and intact groups
were used. Therefore a pretest [treatment] posttest control group design was adopted
in this study. [-6-]

Data Analysis

To ensure the comparability of the two EFL groups in terms of pragmatic knowledge
of speech acts, the DCT developed for this study was administered to the two groups
at the beginning of the study. Summary of the findings for both groups on the pretest
is provided in Table 1. The result of the t-test showed that there is no significant
difference between the two groups before the treatment. Therefore, it could be
concluded that the two groups were homogeneous in terms of pragmatic
comprehension of the speech acts under study.

Table 1. Summary of data for both groups (pre-test)

Group N X SD
Experimental 34 30.00 6.40
Control 32 30.70 6.89

t observed= 0.42 P < 0.05

In order to check the effect of explicit metapragmatic instruction on the speech act
comprehension of the students a posttest was administered to both groups. An
independent sample t-test was used to compare the mean score of the two groups. As
shown in Table 2, a significant difference in the performance of the two groups was
found at P< 0.05 level.

Table 2. Summary of data for both groups (post-test)

Group N X SD
Experimental 34 46.00 8.67
Control 32 35.50 6.90

t observed= 5.49 * Significant at P < 0.05

Conclusion

Overall, the results form the data analysis supported the claim that explicit
metapragmatic instruction facilitates interlanguage pragmatic development. Although
this study did not deal with the 'sequence' of acquiring speech act patterns and
strategies, it showed that explicit metapragmatic instruction in these patterns and
strategies makes significant contributions to the learners' speech act comprehension
processes. The results revealed that pragmatic competence does not seem resistant to
explicit metapragmatic instruction.

The results of this study support the claim that L2 learners may not detect relevant
input features in purely meaning-based L2 use (c.f., Schmidt, 1983; Schmidt & Frota,
1986). It is claimed that in order for noticing to happen, input might have to be made
salient through input enhancement, which will raise the learners' consciousness about
the target features.

The findings of this study shed light on the rather controversial issue of what effects--
if any--explicit instruction has on interlanguage development in an EFL setting. As
indicated, result of the data analysis of this study showed that explicit metapragmatic
instruction by providing input enhancement in the L2 classroom, raising L2 learners'
awareness about the input features, and engaging students in productive class
activities and language use precipitated and facilitated IL pragmatic development to a
considerable degree. The study shows the pivotal role that explicit instruction can
play in EFL settings. [-7-]

The study contributes to the theory of interlanguage pragmatic development. As noted

earlier, pragmatic ability in another language is an important component of an ELL's
communicative competence and must be incorporated in a model of communicative
ability. Although Schmidt (1993, p. 21) points out that 'there has been little discussion
of how pragmatic abilities are acquired in a second language', much has been
contributed to interlanguage pragmatics since then. Studies have flourished within the
field with the eventual aim of providing finding answers to such issues as teachability
of pragmatic competence, the need for teaching L2 pragmatics and, the best
instructional measures to develop pragmatic competence. These issues, as indicated,
have received far too little attention in FLT contexts. This study, as a result, can have
very valuable theoretical and pedagogical implications and applications for this under-
visited area.

The results of the pretest showed that even advanced learners of English did not have
pragmatic awareness of speech acts in the absence of any pertinent instruction. This
implies that some form of metapragmatic instruction—deductive, inductive, implicit,
or explicit—is necessary. According to Kasper (1999), L2 classrooms afford L2
learners the opportunity to reflect on their communicative encounters and to
experiment with different pragmatic options. For EFL learners, however, the
classroom may be the only available setting where they can try out what using the
foreign language feels like, and how much more or less comfortable they are with
various aspects of L2 pragmatics.

In addition, a prerequisite for pragmatic instruction is the availability of especially

prepared and appropriately tuned materials, like books, speech act scenario-based
films with on-screen captions, cassettes, etc. Unfortunately, there is the scarcity of
materials suited for pragmatic development of students. Therefore, material
developers can, following Bardovi-Harlig (1996), adopt a "speech acts framework" in
planning, developing, or writing instructional materials. Many of the recent language
textbooks have attempted to incorporate sociocultural information as an integral part
of language functions. However, they often fail to base their selections on theoretical
descriptions and research evidence on language functions. There is a vast amount of
literature on most speech acts, documenting and revealing how they are performed by
NSs of English with various features in different social contexts. Based on the
available literature, materials could be developed in order to teach students the
patterns, rules, strategies, and linguistic forms by means of which the important
speech acts are interpreted and realized in different contexts. It is necessary, therefore,
for textbooks and teaching syllabuses to reflect the constantly widening scope of
sociocultural research related to speech acts.

Teaching Implications

Pedagogical decisions concerning what and how to teach speech act behavior are
based on the student population and their goals. It seems to us that the first step
toward acquisition of pragmatic rules of speech act realization patterns is a program
aimed at sensitizing learners to cultural differences in speech act behavior across
languages. Making the learner aware of major patterns of behavior in the target
language and of available choices for speech act realization may well help learners
become better users of pragmatic input in L2 and help them make informed choices in
the speech act production as they become more proficient. [-8-]

There is a vast amount of literature describing what major semantic formulas make up
the English speech acts of requesting, apologizing, and complimenting. . For the
purpose of syllabus design, we would assume that the learner needs to know how to
interpret and produce these speech acts in a variety of interactive discourse situations
in the target language. However, in what contexts, and which of these speech acts
learners are most likely to come across must be considered by teachers and syllabus
designers in each case.
Once we have developed a list of most likely encountered situations for each of the
speech acts relevant for a particular group of learners, we need to decide which of the
realization patters are suitable for the early part of the course and which should be left
for a later stage. Such sequencing decisions would depend mostly on the immediate
needs of the learners and linguistic complexity of the specific speech act realization
patterns.

The next step in the syllabus design process would be to decide which and how many
semantic formulas should be introduced at each point in the syllabus or in each class
session based on the selected situations.

In order to empower learners to make their own choices, we need to expose them to
patterns used most commonly by native speakers of the L2. Speech act research is
abundant and can be used by teachers to expose students to the most prevalent patters
of language use for different speech functions. Manes and Wolfson (1981) and
Wolfson (1989) emphasize the regular structure, highly formulaic, and the astonishing
repetitiveness of English compliments, for example. Studies on apologies further
illustrate the little variation in apology speech act formulas in English (Cohen &
Olshtain, 1981). Furthermore, literature on requestive speech acts have shown the
relative regularity of realization patters for requesting in English (Blum-Kulka,
House, & Kasper, 1989)

It seems appropriate then to incorporate the most common linguistic forms native
speakers use to realize a speech act at the beginning, while the various subformulas
and supportive moves that either mitigate or intensify the force of the speech act can
be introduced gradually as learners become more proficient.

A critical issue in relation to conforming to target language community norms is the

willingness or necessity for ELLs to perform according to the target community
pragmatic norms. Most ELLs in this study are going to be future teachers of English
and we have assumed that they are desirous of improving L2 pragmatics, especially
pragmatic awareness. We have provided input to learners that goes beyond teacher-
fronted, status unequal input and assisted learners with their pragmatic
comprehension. As Bardovi-Harlig (2001, p. 30) mention promoting pragmatic
comprehension and providing authentic input to learners provides them with a
'fighting chance' and empowers them to make informed decisions in their pragmatic
choices. Learners need to recognize the social function of different speech acts and
the significance of different degrees of indirectness. Making contextualized,
pragmatically appropriate language input available to learners in an EFL context in
which they don't have the chance to encounter this input outside the classroom is
pedagogically necessary and politically right. Helping students to understand the way
pragmatic principles operate in other cultures, encouraging them to look for the
different pragmatic or discoursal norms which may underlie national and ethnic
stereotyping, is pedagogically necessary. Such techniques, I would suggest, are
desirable both pedagogically and politically. To give the learner the knowledge and
tools to make an informed choice and allowing her/him the freedom to flout
pragmatic conventions, is to acknowledge her/his individuality and freedom of choice
and to respect her/his system of values and beliefs (Thomas, 1983). The adoption of
sociocultural rules as one's own in L2 pragmatic production is an individual decision.
However it is our responsibility to equip the learners with enough knowledge to make
an informed choice and to not inadvertently convey messages they did not intend. [-
9-]

About the Authors

Zohreh Eslami-Rasekh is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University. Her

research interests are intercultural pragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics, and
sociocultural issues related to teaching ESL/EFL.

Abbas Eslami-Rasekh is an Assistant Professor at Isfahan University in Iran. His

research interests are issues related to ESL/EFL methodology, second language
acquisition and EFL teacher education.

Azizollah Fatahi is a Ph.D. candidate in TEFL at Allame Tabatabei University in

Tehran, Iran. His research interests are intercultural and interlanguage pragmatics.

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