Abstract:
Since the 1990s,a substantial body of interventionist interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) research has probed the efficacy of various instructional pragmatics approaches,with speech acts serving as its prime target. The present study compared the short-term and long-term effects of individual and collaborative output-based instruction on EFL learners’ acquisition of English “apologies,” “requests,” and “refusals.” For this purpose,54 intermediate EFL learners,making up an individual output group (N=26) and a collaborative output group (N=28),participated in the study. Individual and collaborative output-based instruction was offered over nine consecutive sessions (three sessions on each speech act). Each of the nine treatment sessions involved the presentation of video input containing the speech acts under investigation,followed by individual and collaborative output production and manipulation tasks. Moreover,a 24-item WDCT was used to measure the participants’ speech act production ability at the pre-treatment,immediate post-treatment,and delayed post-treatment phases of the study. The results indicated significant gains for both individual and collaborative output groups from the pretest to the immediate and delayed posttests,and the greater efficacy of collaborative output over individual output. The findings reveal the potential of learner output,both individual and collaborative,for ILP development and the greater advantage collaborative output production and manipulation tasks can offer.
Machine summary:
"The present study compared the short-term and long-term effects of individual and collaborative output-based instruction on EFL learners’ acquisition of English "apologies," "requests," and "refusals.
One potential framework within which pragmatic competence can be investigated from an acquisitional learner-oriented perspective is Swain’s (1985) comprehensible output hypothesis, which capitalizes on the significance of providing learners with opportunities for classroom language use and pushing them to modify their output and make themselves more comprehensible (Mitchell & Myles, 2004; Shehadeh, 2002).
3. Purpose of the Study The present study was designed to compare the short-term and long- term effects of individual and collaborative output-based instruction on EFL learners’ production of the three speech acts of "apology," "request," and "refusal.
" Accordingly, the following question was formulated: Do individual and collaborative output-based instructional approaches significantly differ with each other in terms of their short-term and long-term effects on EFL learners’ speech act production ability?
6. Discussion The present study substantiated the short-term and long-term effects of individual and collaborative output-based instruction on EFL learners’ speech act production ability, with the latter exerting a greater positive short-term and long-term influence.
The results of the present study provide counterevidence to this claim: Same language and sociocultural background does not seem to be the main factor in determining collaborative dialoging’s potential for ILP development; rather, the depth of consciousness of relevant pragmatic features that collaborative output raises in learners, as evident in its lingering positive effect, can play a determining role."