A Study of the effects of explicit and implicit teachings on developing Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence

The role of teaching to develop learners’ pragmatic competence in both second and foreign language contexts has recently motivated a great deal of research. This paper aims to show whether learners’ pragmatic competence of ‘suggesting speech act’ improves after pragmatic language teaching, and to indicate what type of pragmatic language teaching is more effective in developing learners’ pragmatic competence of suggesting speech act. The participants were classified into the explicit teaching group, the implicit teaching group and the control group. Each group consisted of thirty Chinese EFL learners. The subjects in the explicit teaching group were taught metapragmatic information on the preselected target suggestion forms and were asked to do Chinese-English translation exercises using these target ‘suggestion’ forms. The subjects in the implicit teaching group were asked to compare their English suggestion forms in their completed role-plays with those in the NS-NS role-play transcripts and were also asked to find the differences in suggestion realization patterns between their suggestion forms and the NS suggestion forms. The subjects in the control group did not receive any metapragmatic teaching on suggestions, were required to read the NS-NS role-play transcripts, and were asked to answer each question in English. The study used a pretest and a posttest to measure the effects of pragmatic language teaching on the subjects’ pragmatic ability of making appropriate suggestions in different situations. Results of this study showed that pragmatic language teaching has a positive effects on the development of Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence of suggesting speech act. The also indicated that explicit pragmatic language teaching is more effective in facilitating acquisition of pragamalinguistic suggestion forms.