Teaching English Pragmatics by Taking a Sociocultural Stance

This study investigated the effects of sociocultural instruction on developing the speech act of criticizing. The participants were second language learners in two English learning classrooms as experimental and control groups. The participants in the experimental group operated under the basic principles of the socio-cultural approach with interactive tasks, cooperation, and scaffolding. They were asked to read and criticize a peer’s work orally. For this group, the teacher provided fined tuned instruction and mediated individual tutor feedback. For both the experimental and control groups, the learners’ pragmatic development was measured through pre-tests, immediate and delayed posttests performance of discourse completion and role-play tests. The researchers analyzed the results of tests through statistical procedures such as paired and independent t-tests. The results revealed that the experimental group significantly improved and performed better than the control group, indicating the successfulness of sociocultural instruction. Next, the researchers interviewed the participants to find about their feelings. After interviewing the participants, the researchers found positive feelings of learners about this kind of instruction including low degrees of stress, high levels of excitement, fun, motivation, and clarity that provided another evidence for worthwhile impacts of sociocultural instruction.