Pragmatic comprehension of apology, request and refusal: An investigation on the effect of consciousness-raising video-driven prompts

Abstract

Recent research in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has substantiated that some aspects of <br />pragmatics are amenable to instruction in the second or foreign language classroom. However, <br />there are still controversies over the most conducive teaching approaches and the required <br />materials. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of consciousness-raising video-driven prompts on the comprehension of the three speech acts of apology, request, <br />and refusal on seventy eight (36 male and 42 female) upper-intermediate Persian learners of <br />English who were randomly assigned to four groups (metapragmatic, form-search, role play, <br />and control). The four groups were exposed to 45 video vignettes (15 for each speech act) <br />extracted from different episodes of Flash Forward, Stargate TV Series and Annie Hall Film for <br />nine 60-minute sessions of instruction twice a week. Results of the multiple choice discourse <br />completion test (MDCT) indicated that learners' awareness of apologies, requests and refusals <br />benefit from all three types of instruction, but the results of the Post hoc test of Tukey (HSD) <br />illustrated that the metapragmatic group outperformed the other treatment groups, and that <br />form-search group had a better performance than role-play and control groups.