the role of literary instruction on speech act recognition

This quasi-experimental study was an attempt to investigate possible contribution of literary plays as a medium of instruction to thedevelopment of pragmatic awareness through either explicit or implicit mode of instruction. eighty university students majoring inenglish were assigned to four experimental groups: two literary and two nonliterary groups. one literary group (implicit play) was exposed to typographically enhanced plays containing the three speech acts of apology, request, and refusal and the other (explicit play) received the same plus metapragmatic instruction on the speech acts. the nonliterary groups were presented with dialogs rich in the cases of the given acts; they also received enhanced input (implicit dialog) or input plus metapragmatic information (explicit dialog). analyses of the four groups’ performance on mdct pretest and posttest did not indicate any significant difference among the groups.