Short-term and long-term impacts of individual and collaborative pragmatic output on speech act production

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.