Raising pragmatic awareness: Effect of contrastive discourse markers on iBT speaking module

Although discourse markers lend themselves widely to spoken as well as written discourse, unfortunately there is not any common consensus on categorization, classification, status and other related issues. The present study endeavored to find out if raising pragmatic awareness in the case of contrastive discourse markers has a statistically significant effect on speaking proficiency. The effect of raising pragmatic awareness on speaking proficiency through peer interactions was also investigated. To this end, 30 EFL Iranian high intermediate learners (25 females and 5 males), homogenized by standardized placement test of Cambridge, participated in the study. After going through the pre-test, namely iBT speaking sample, they were exposed to 18 speaking tasks listed in Phillips (2007), followed by a post-test as well as a delayed post-test. Next, three raters considering data-driven reasoning processes listened to 540 participants’ recorded files and scored the performances. The results of the research revealed a statistically significant effect of raising pragmatic awareness on speaking proficiency by contrastive discourse markers deductive teaching on one hand and the statistically significant effect of raising pragmatic awareness on speaking proficiency through peer interactions on the other.