The Instruction of Second Language Pragmatics For the Speech Act Of Request: A Meta-Analysis

Pragmatics, the interlocutors’ intention in their joint action, has been as an interminable area of research in language learning, teaching, and assessment over the last decades. the surge of interest in pragmatic instruction has culminated in the variety of acknowledged constructs such as speech acts, conversational implicatures, prosody, routines, among which speech acts are the most dominant aspects of pragmatic competence that have gained momentum. one of the speech acts is request, which has been investigated extensively for its manifold applications; however, the results of intervention on this speech act are yet inconclusive. to shed more light on the overall effectiveness of different teaching methods, the main focus of the present meta-analysis was to provide a quantitative measure of the effects of instruction for the speech act of request in iran. moreover, it aimed to bring to the fore the relationship between some variables that moderate its effectiveness, including age, gender, proficiency level, treatment type, research design, and data collection procedure. among 37 studies, which were retrieved by establishing a set of different inclusion/exclusion criteria, 17 primary studies were coded and analyzed. the results demonstrated that (1) there was an overall large effect size on the effectiveness of the instruction of request (g=1.48) in an iranian context; (2) some variables were found to be a moderator for this effectiveness, such as gender and treatment type; (3) considering the gender, the male group produced larger effect size (g= 3.09) than females (g=1.10); (4), and regarding the treatment types, the explicit group yielded larger effect size (g=1.53) than the implicit one (g=1.20). in light of the gained results, a thorough interpretation of the results, as well as a discussion of practical, theoretical, and methodological implications of the paper, was made to tackle a number of conundrums surrounding the instruction of request.

The Instruction of Second Language Pragmatics for the Speech Act of Request: A Meta-Analysis

Pragmatics, the interlocutors’ intention in their joint action, has been as an interminable area of research in language learning, teaching, and assessment over the last decades. The surge of interest in pragmatic instruction has culminated in the variety of acknowledged constructs such as speech acts, conversational implicatures, prosody, routines, among which speech acts are the most dominant aspects of pragmatic competence that have gained momentum. One of the speech acts is request, which has been investigated extensively for its manifold applications; however, the results of intervention on this speech act are yet inconclusive. To shed more light on the overall effectiveness of different teaching methods, the main focus of the present meta-analysis was to provide a quantitative measure of the effects of instruction for the speech act of request in Iran. Moreover, it aimed to bring to the fore the relationship between some variables that moderate its effectiveness, including age, gender, proficiency level, treatment type, research design, and data collection procedure. Among 37 studies, which were retrieved by establishing a set of different inclusion/exclusion criteria, 17 primary studies were coded and analyzed. The results demonstrated that (1) there was an overall large effect size on the effectiveness of the instruction of request (g=1.48) in an Iranian context; (2) some variables were found to be a moderator for this effectiveness, such as gender and treatment type; (3) considering the gender, the male group produced larger effect size (g= 3.09) than females (g=1.10); (4), and regarding the treatment types, the explicit group yielded larger effect size (g=1.53) than the implicit one (g=1.20). In light of the gained results, a thorough interpretation of the results, as well as a discussion of practical, theoretical, and methodological implications of the paper, was made to tackle a number of conundrums surrounding the instruction of request.