The Effect of Colligational Corpus-based Instruction on Enhancing the Pragmalinguistic Knowledge of Request Speech Act among Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners

This study investigated the effectiveness of colligational corpus-based instruction on enhancing the pragmalinguistic knowledge of speech act of request among Iranian intermediate EFL learners. The objective of the study was to find out whether or not providing students with corpora through using colligational instruction had any significant effects on enhancing their pragmalinguistic knowledge and, hence, speech act learning. Sixty participants from several institutes in Mazandaran Province, Iran, participated in the study. They were all intermediate- level students, and were divided into two homogeneous groups (30 each) of experimental and control groups based on the OPT results. A multiple discourse completion test was then administered to both groups as the pretest to measure their ability and knowledge in using the speech act of request. Subsequently, the treatment started where the experimental group received corpus-based instruction through colligational practices, while the control group practiced learning the same speech act through traditional or common methods of learning speech acts (i.e., using textbooks, audios, and videos). After 15 sessions of training, a posttest of multiple discourse completion test was administered. The data were analyzed using paired- and independent-samples t tests. In order to increase the validity of the results, the researchers observed and interviewed all the participants, too. The results that learning of the speech act of request improved significantly better through corpus-based instruction vis-à-vis traditional method of teaching colligations.