Does Interlanguage Pragmatic Measure Enhancement Change the Data Pattern? A Mixed-Methods Approach

The field of interlanguage pragmatics has always reflected on its methodology and the validity of the collected data through various data collection methods. Moreover, whether they approximate the authentic data has always been a serious concern in the field. Drawing upon Schauer’s (2009) taxonomy of the request speech act and its internal and external modification devices, the present study was an attempt to investigate the effects of enhancing Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs). To this end, the requests of 30 EFL students, produced via non-modified and modified DCTs, were compared with their authentic requests recorded in the institutional classroom context. The findings revealed that the modified Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) and the Oral Discourse Completion Task (ODCT) approximated the Natural Methodology in terms of the request head act and internal modification devices but not external modifiers. To investigate the deeper layers of the respondents thoughts on DCTs, unstructured interviews were also conducted. Although the artificiality of the DCTs and their test-like nature, in general, were regarded as the weak points of the DCTs by the interviewees, they asserted that the modified DCTs improved their self-confidence and understanding of the scenarios. The findings cautiously suggest that the modified version of DCTs enjoys the positive features of both non-modified DCTs, tapping pragmalinguistic and metapragmatic knowledge of the respondents, and partly, the Natural Methodology, eliciting the respondents’ sociopragmatic knowledge.