Abstract
This thesis explores the effect of concept-based pragmatic instruction (CBPI) in developing Iraqi Arabic-speaking EFL university students’ conceptual knowledge and performance abilities in English requests. Requests have been one of the most investigated features in interventional pragmatic studies. However, the majority of the interventional studies take forms as the point of departure in their treatment and focus less on meaning. In contrast, this study takes meaning as the focus and the point of departure in its treatment by utilising CBPI. Drawing from Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, CBPI is based on three main principals: concepts as the minimal units of instruction, materialisation of concepts through didactic models (e.g., diagrams), and verbalisation to internalise the concepts. The main aim of the study was to examine the learners’ sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic conceptual development. A secondary aim was to examine how learners of different proficiency levels would respond to CBPI.
The learners were 9 high intermediate (HIL) learners and 8 elementary (EL) learners. The intervention involved a 5-session course, in addition to one pre-test session and one post-test session. The intervention was designed around the principles of concepts, materialisation, and verbalisation. The principles formed the basis of CBPI cards (adapted from van Compernolle, 2012), which oriented learners and helped them materialise and verbalise the concepts. Learners engaged in video-based language analysis tasks, scenario performances, and contextualized request analyses. Development was assessed through pre- and post-interviews, scenarios, and appropriateness judgement questionnaires (AJQs), as well as scenarios within the intervention course that allowed development to be assessed as it happened. Data were analysed qualitatively by comparing pre- and post-test data and conducting a microgenetic analysis of scenarios.
Results showed 1) marked development in the learners’ conceptual understanding of the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic resources, 2) some notable development in the learners’ performance abilities, although not as much as in their conceptual understanding, and 3) no major differences between the two proficiency groups in the interview data.
Most learners showed development, but the AJQ and scenario data showed a clear advantage of HIL learners over EL learners, suggesting that higher proficiency learners benefit more from CBPI. This difference could be attributed to several factors including the linguistic and cultural distance between English and Arabic and the fact that each learner has his/her unique ZPD and development trajectory. The study contributes to the literature by expanding the applicability of CBPI in pragmatics to teaching requests to Arabic-speaking learners of English. Finally, this thesis calls for future research to explore how other learners whose L1 is distant from their L2 respond to CBPI, especially for other speech acts.