exploring the enhancement of cultural pragmatic transparency via the application of consciousness-raising techniques in iranians efl online classes

Nowadays, cultural awareness is an inseparable part of language acquisition and l2 pragmatic development. providing comprehensible cultural input in online efl classrooms has turned to be an issue for the stakeholders in iran’s context. to address this issue, excruciating attention should be paid to cultural pragmatic transparency (cpt) of input. cpt refers to the clarity and comprehensibility of cultural locutionary and illocutionary forces embedded in input. the current study with a quasi-experimental design sought to investigate the impact of consciousness-raising techniques on cpt. the participants of this study were 42 advanced efl learners divided into two groups, namely experimental and control. the subjects were homogenized by the oxford placement test at the onset of the study. a written discourse completion test (wdct) was administered following the english test of proficiency as the pre-test. throughout ten treatment sessions, the experimental group received 15 audio-visual and written extracts on various cultural points in three varieties of english including american, british, and canadian. the treatment in the experimental group was reinforced by input enhancement and input flooding techniques. however, the control group received only a placebo without any focus-on-form interventions. finally, the same wdct was administered to determine if there was any statistically significant difference between the participants' performances in the experimental and control groups. the results of the t-test revealed that the experimental group outperformed its counterpart in the post-test of the study. therefore, input enhancement and input flooding techniques might contribute to the cpt in second language acquisition. the findings might have implications for language teachers and material developers to include consciousness-raising activities to enhance cpt.