The impact of explicit and implicit instruction on iranian EFL learners’ production and recognition of language functions

Since the early 1980s, researchers have established that the foreign language learners’ development of various aspects of pragmatic competence may be facilitated by the instruction of pragmatic routines and strategies in the foreign language classroom (Kasper & Rose, 2001). Consistent with this line of research, this study investigated the extent to which two instructional paradigms, explicit vs. implicit instruction, affect learners’ ability to produce and recognize speech acts of request and invitation in English. Thirty homogeneous Iranian Intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to two groups: Explicit Group (EG) and Implicit Group (IG). A pre-test was given to the two groups to measure their ability of producing and recognizing request and invitation speech acts prior to any treatment. Then, they were exposed to two kinds of instructions. While the explicit group received explicit metapragmatic instruction and explicit feedback, the implicit group was provided with implicit instruction and implicit feedback. The results of the posttest, administered after the treatment, indicated that the participants, who received explicit focus on form instruction, outperformed those in the implicit group. The findings are encouraging for the use of explicit pragmatic instruction in classrooms to develop a greater pragmatic competence.