THE ROLE OF AWARENESS-RAISING IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF EFL LEARNERS’ PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE

Abstract

In EFL teaching, grammatical competence is usually prioritized over pragmatic competence. This is a major source of learners’ failure to interpret intended meanings and produce appropriate utterances (Cook, 2001). The aim of this study is to investigate the role of awareness-raising instruction in the development of learners’ pragmatic competence through intervention. The focus in the instruction period is on the pragmatic features of the speech act of refusal in the target language. The results show that consciousness-raising seems effective in the development of pragmatic knowledge and use of the target language. There are significant improvements on the part of the treatment group in making refusals. Resort to language pragmatic transfer and teaching-induced errors, noticed in the pre-test, have remarkably lessened.