Short-term and Long-term Impact of Video-driven Metapragmatic Awareness Raising on Speech Act Production: A Case of Iranian Interme-diate EFL Learners

Since the 1990s, multitudinous studies have sketched the main and comparative impacts of various ap-proaches to L2 pragmatic instruction. To contribute to this line of research, the present study probed the immediate and delayed effect of explicit video-driven metapragmatic awareness-raising on Iranian EFL learners’ production of English “apologies,” “requests,” and “refusals.” To this end, 54 intermediate EFL learners were assigned to an experimental or metapragmatic awareness raising group (N=29) and a con-trol group (N=25). Treatment spanned 9 consecutive sessions (3 sessions on each speech act). The 3 speech act-specific treatment sessions involved the presentation of speech act-contained video input, fol-lowed by teacher-fronted presentation of the speech act strategy set in the 1st session, a video transcript-based speech act recognition and reasoning task in the 2nd session, and 5 multiple-choice discourse com-pletion and reasoning task in the 3rd session. The control group, however, received the same video input as the experimental group, followed by class discussions around its theme in each of the 9 sessions. Speech act production of the 2 groups was measured through a 24-item Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) at the pre-treatment, immediate post-treatment, and delayed post-treatment phases of the study. The results indicated the positive short-term and long-term impact of metapragmatic awareness-raising on speech act production, though no significant improvement was detected from the immediate to the delayed posttest. The findings serve to augment evidence in support of the teachability of pragmatics, as well as the potential of video prompt-driven metapragmatic awareness raising for short-term and long-term interlanguage pragmatic development.