Evaluating the Effects of Input-based Approaches to the Teaching of Pragmalinguistics and Sociopragmatics in Second Language Pragmatics: A Case of English Request Hedges

• Main Author: Masahiro Takimoto
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: The International Academic Forum 2014-10-01
• Series: IAFOR Journal of Language Learning
• Subjects: sociopragmatics; input-based; hedge; pragmatic
• Online Access: https://iafor.org/journal/iafor-journal-of-language-learning/volume-1-issue-1/article-1/

The present study examined the effects of two types of input-based approaches – combination of pragmalinguistics – and sociopragmatics-focused instruction (CI) and sociopragmatics-focused instruction (SI) on learners' recognizing and producing English request hedges. 45 Japanese learners of English participated in the study. Treatment group performance was compared to that of a control group on the pretests, post-tests, and delayed post-tests: an unplanned written-production test, an unplanned written-judgment test. The results showed that the CI and SI groups performed significantly better than the control group on an unplanned written-judgment test. There were no statistically significant differences between the two treatment groups on the unplanned written-judgment test, which indicated that the sociopragmatics-focused instruction attracted the attention of the SI group to the sociopragmatic features of English request hedges directly, and the group perhaps then transferred their attention to the pragmalinguistic features of English request hedges. As a result, the sociopragmatics-focused activities alone had some effects on recognizing English request hedges. However, a comparison of those learners in the two experimental groups in the unplanned written-production test demonstrated an advantage for the CI group and implied that the input-based learning through not only sociopragmatics-focused activities but also pragmalinguistics-sociopragmatics connection activities contributed more to deep perceptual and mental processing of English request hedges, thereby resulting in developing more firmly established explicit knowledge.