Pragmatics Instruction and Its Effect on EFL Students’ Writing

VOLDÁNOVÁ, Žaneta. Pragmatics Instruction and Its Effect on EFL Students’ Writing. In Tenth Brno Conference on Linguistics Studies in English. 2023.

Basic information

• Original name: Pragmatics Instruction and Its Effect on EFL Students’ Writing
• Name in Czech: Výuka pragmatiky a její vliv na psaní u studentů AJ jako cizího jazyka
• Authors: VOLDÁNOVÁ, Žaneta.
• Edition: Tenth Brno Conference on Linguistics Studies in English, 2023.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: 50301 Education, general; including training, pedagogy, didactics [and education systems]
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• Organization unit: Faculty of Education
• Keywords (in Czech): pragmatika; výuka pragmatiky; studenti AJ jako cizího jazyka; psaní; kvaziexperiment
• Keywords in English: pragmatics; pragmatics instruction; EFL students; writing; quasi-experiment
• Tags: International impact

Abstract

Pragmatic aspects of utterances are an essential part of conveying a message successfully, be that through spoken conversation or written communication. Combining the disciplines of linguistics and didactics, the presented research deals with the impact of explicit pragmatics instruction on concepts such as speech acts, the co-operative principle, politeness, or explicitness and implicitness on EFL students’ writing skills. More specifically, it focuses on pragmatic aspects of the students’ texts in terms of their abilities to write formal and informal texts with regard to the addressee, context, and situation. The presentation aims to summarise preliminary data collected in a quasiexperiment carried out with the participation of university students of the Primary school teacher training programme. It was assumed that explicit pragmatics instruction and practice has a positive effect on the development of EFL university students’ writing skills. This hypothesis was tested with the use of a pre-test and a post-test and an assessment scale revolving around the pragmatic aspects of the texts. The students’ performance on the pre-test and posttest was compared both within and across the groups (control and experimental). The results indicate that the use of explicit pragmatics instruction on the concepts stated above is justified and helps the EFL students to produce texts with respect to the addressee and to express the message more appropriately to the context and given situation.

Links

• MUNI/A/1335/2022, interní kód MU: Name: Výzkum v didaktice cizích jazyků

Investor: Masaryk University, Research in foreign language didactics