The Impact of Form-Focused Instruction on the Development of Iranian EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Awareness: A Focus on ‘Apology’ Speech Act

Pragmatics is one of the most challenging areas for language learners as they are generally notaware of the negative perceptions produced because of their pragmatic infelicities (Gass, Behney& Polnsky, 2013). The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effect of form-focusedinstruction on the development of pragmatic awareness of the speech act of apology among theIranian EFL learners. To this end, 60 female and male learners out of 88 participants, with theage range of 20 to 40, were selected based on their performance on a piloted Preliminary EnglishTest (PET). They were divided into two experimental groups of 30. The groups wereadministered a questionnaire as a pragmatic test before being exposed to the treatments. The firstexperimental group received explicit form-focused instructions. However, the secondexperimental group received implicit form-focused treatments regarding the speech act ofapology. The treatments lasted 10 sessions and ended in a posttest administration of thepragmatic test to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatments provided. The study adopted aquasi-experimental design. The results of the t-test analyses of the study showed that the twoexperimental groups had significant improvement from the pretest to the posttest but the firstexperimental group that received explicit form-focused instruction outperformed the secondgroup regarding the speech act awareness of apology. The findings of the study could bebeneficial for EFL language learners, teachers, and syllabus designers who are interested inunderstanding the possible impact of pragmatic awareness on language performance.

کلیدواژه ها:

communicative competence ، explicit and implicit FFI ، form-focused instruction ، pragmatics ، speech act theory