Effects of Instructional Intervention in Low-Level College Students' Learning of Request Acts

This paper explores the effects of two different methods of instruction for 106 low-level Korean learners of English at a college in learning request expressions. Both of the methods contained the focus-on-form and function characteristics, while the degree of explicitness for input enhancement was differentiated. Abundant email samples written by English native speakers for the input were provided and email writing practice for the output was proceeded for both groups of the students in the treatment sessions. The numbers of target forms used in pretest and posttest results were compared quantitatively: The tests included email writing and open-ended Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The results indicated that the target pragmatic features were slightly better learned under the condition of relatively high degree of explicit instruction with metapragmatic information, even though the difference was statistically insignificant. In addition, the students' use of request strategies both in email and DCT was affected positively by the treatment with email input and output. That is, the students applied the request strategies they learned through email into their oral production (open-ended DCT) as well as their email writing. Further study on the output effect of target features in advancing pragmatic competence is suggested.