Recently, interlanguage pragmatics development in second language acquisition has gained more attention among researchers (Kasper, 2000; Ohta, 2005; Rose, 2009; Malmir & Derakhshan, 2020). Pragmatics is defined as “the science of knowledge seen in relation to its users” (Mey, 1993, p. 5). According to Kasper (1996, p. 145), “interlanguage pragmatics is the study of non-native speakers’ use and acquisition of second language pragmatic knowledge” in both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic terms (Kasper & Roever, 2005; Taguchi, 2019; 2020). In other words, it studies how non-native learners acquire pragmatic knowledge and how they understand and use it in the second language. Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) examines how second language learners develop the ability to understand and perform action in a target language (Kasper & Rose, 2002). Second language acquisition (SLA) researchers pay more attention to ILP, due to its importance in the communication (Alemi & Khanlarzadeh, 2016; Eslami-Rasekh, 2005; Rose & Kasper, 2001; Roever, 2005). Hence, no one can deny the paramount importance of ILP in SLA.
Some studies (e.g. Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1991, 1993; Omar, 1991; Takahashi & Beebe, 1987; Derakhshan & Eslami, 2020) indicated discrepancies between learners’ pragmatic development and grammatical development. Therefore, even highly proficient second language learners make mistake in the communication due to their lack of pragmatic knowledge. As Blum-Kulka (1997) noted, L2 learners’ pragmatic mistakes are considered more unacceptable by their L2 interlocutors than their linguistic mistakes. Indeed, research into pragmatic competence demonstrated that EFL learners were more conscious of grammatically incorrect utterances than pragmatically inappropriate utterances (Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei, 1998). These studies corroborate the importance of pragmatic competence in foreign language learning.
Perhaps one of the problems that most of the teachers confronted in teaching second language is how to deal with correcting learners’ mistakes in their speech. Gass (1997) asserted that language learners have access to two types of input: positive evidence and negative evidence. Positive evidence informs the learner of what is admissible in the target language and includes “the set of well-formed sentences to which learners are exposed” (p. 36). In contrast, negative evidence provides the learner with information about the erroneousness of an L2 form or utterance and is often perceived through the provision of corrective feedback in response to the learner’s non-native like L2 production. In order to investigate the roles of positive and negative evidence, there is one framework which is based on the role of corrective feedback in L2 acquisition.
According to Sheen (2007), Corrective feedback is a teacher's reflexive move that invites a learner to note to the grammatical accuracy of the utterance which is produced by the learner. Ellis, Loewen, and Erlam (2006) argued that the corrective feedback takes the form of one or a combination of the following replies by a teacher when a learner makes an error: (1) an indication that the learner committed an error, (2) the provision of correct form of the error, and (3) the provision of some metalingual explanation regarding the error (P. 340). The most comprehensive classification of corrective feedback proposed by Lyster and Ranta (1997) includes six categories: recast, explicit correction, elicitation, metalinguistic feedback, repetition, and clarification request. Among these categories, recast, metalinguistic feedback and clarification request will be considered in the current study which recast and clarification request are implicit and metalinguistic is explicit type of feedback. A point of focus in this current study is the effect of these three types of feedback and whether the manner of the correction affects the learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development.
Although there is a plenty of research on the effect of explicit and implicit types of feedback in the areas of lexis, grammar phonology, the effect of different types of feedback on interlangauge pragmatic development has been explored for less. Therefore, due to the importance of corrective feedback in interlanguge pragmatic (ILP) development, the present study aims at investigating which type of corrective feedback is more effective regarding Iranian EFL learners’ ILP development in the case of invitation acceptance and declination.
Literature review
There are some studies in support of explicit forms of feedback (Spada, 1997; Seedhouse, 1997) and others which give superiority to implicit uses of corrective feedback (Long, 1996). According to Seedhouse (1997), teachers’ preferences for implicit uses of corrective feedback are due to that they mark linguistic errors as overwhelming and problematic. He asserted in support of more direct and overt corrective feedback so that “pedagogy and interaction would then work in tandem” (p. 572). Also, Gass (1988) argued that without straight or repeated negative evidence in the input which would allow learners to figure out discrepancies between their learner language and the target language, fossilization might occur.
Long (1996) supported the implicit use of interactional moves, including, “various input and conversational modifications, which immediately follow learner utterances and maintain reference to their meaning” (p. 452). Based on the interaction hypothesis, such responses provide learners with negative evidence that in turn comforts language development. Similarly, Ellis (1994) in favor of implicit forms of feedback argued that preparation of negative evidence particularly in the form of implicit types of feedback simplifies the development of L2 syntactic ability.
Malmir and Derakhshan (2020) in their research aimed to find out L2 pragmatic comprehension strategies used by Iranian EFL learners and to discover whether there would be any differences between interlanguage pragmatic comprehension strategies used by male and female learners. They indicated three classes of pragmatic comprehension strategies, namely socio-pragmatic, lexico-pragmatic and cognitive; they also found that gender did not play any significant role in the use of pragmatic comprehension strategies.
Lyster and Ranta (1997) conducted a study which indicated that elicitation, metalinguistic feedback, clarification requests, and repetition led to learners’ self-repair more successfully than recast and explicit correction because the first four different types of corrective feedback made learners more aware of their errors and permitted for learners’ self-repair.
Lyster (1998) in one descriptive study of the various types of recasts used by teachers in content-based classrooms concluded that young learners faced hesitancy being unlikely to notice the majority of recasts in these contexts as negative evidence. The findings indicated that teachers used recasts following ungrammatical learner utterances in the same ways that they use non corrective repetition following grammatical learner utterances. Consequently, recasts, like non corrective repetitions, were perceived by learners as positive evidence information about what is permissible in the target language rather than negative evidence.
Mackey and Philp (1998) also reported the significant effects of recasts on learning with regard to L2 learners' acquisition of question forms. Particularly, they revealed that developmentally ready learners who were frequently exposed to recasts during communicative tasks outperformed both the group that received no recasts in the production of more advanced question forms as well as those learners who were not developmentally ready to acquire the target form.
In another research, Lochtman (2002) investigated the role of different types of oral corrective feedback in analytic foreign language teaching/FLT. The Results of the study indicated that the dispensation of the different types of corrective feedback within analytic FLT revolves according to different classroom activities. Further, he found that by changing the focus to meaning (text comprehension), the number of recasts is significantly higher. He concluded that in analytic FLT both recast and explicit correction are effective but might serve different purposes. The findings revealed that for both strategies the amount of correct uptake was the same.
Sheen (2007) also examined the effects of recasts and metalinguistic corrective feedback on the acquisition of English articles and the extent to which learners’ language analytic ability and attitudes towards corrective feedback mediate the effects of corrective feedback with three groups of intermediate-level EFL learners. The results revealed that the metalinguistic group outperformed both the recast and the control groups while the recast group did not perform significantly better than the control group. The results also showed an important relationship between benefiting from metalinguistic feedback and learners’ language analysis ability and also their views towards error correction. No such relations were found for the recast group.
Lyster and Saito (2010) in their meta-analysis investigated the pedagogical effectiveness of oral corrective feedback (CF) on target language development. They concluded that CF had significant and lasting effects on language learning. Furthermore, they asserted that the consequences were greater for prompts than recasts and most outward in techniques that elicit freely constructed responses. The instructional setting was not identified as a contributing factor to CF effectiveness. Moreover, they found that younger learners benefited from CF More than older learners. Regarding the wide range of CF types that constitute both explicit correction and implicit, the authors affirmed that further investigation is needed to identify the components of these CF types that might contribute to their effectiveness.
In another meta-analysis study Li (2010) investigated the effectiveness of corrective feedback. The analysis indicated that explicit feedback worked better than implicit feedback over the short term and that the effects of implicit feedback did not decline or increase over the long term. Moreover, he identified some significant moderators such as research context, research setting, task type, treatment length, and interlocutor type. In a similar way, Carroll and Swain (1993) studied the effects of negative evidence on the learning of the dative alternation rule in English. The group which received explicit metalinguistic feedback outperformed all groups, including the recast group.
Another study conducted by Fakher Ajabshir (2014) investigated the effects of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on pragmatic development of Iranian EFL learners. Forty intermediate participants in this study received explicit type of feedback (matalinguistic explanation) and implicit type of feedback (recast) in response to any utterance containing an error in doing the role plays of refusals. One week after a treatment lasting 10 days, interlanguage pragmatic development was measured by a Discourse Completion Test. The result of the study indicated that both treatment groups outperformed the control group and also the explicit group performed better in comparison to the implicit group.
To investigate the effect of cognitive and interpersonal task-based instruction on EFL Learners’ production of two speech acts of apology and request Bagherkazemi and Harati-Asl (2022) have designed a study on 125 intermediate EFL learners. The findings indicated the significant effect of both cognitive and interpersonal tasks, but also the greater effectiveness of the latter for speech act production. The potential of task-based instruction and interaction for EFL learners’ pragmatic development were also emphasized.
Following this line of inquiry and due to the dearth of research in the effect of corrective feedback on interlanguage pragmatic development, the purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of three types of corrective feedbacks (recast, metalinguistic & clarification request) on Iranian EFL learners’ interlanguage pragmatics development in the case of invitation acceptance and declination. The framework of this study has been adopted from Lyster and Ranata’s (1997) analytic model.
Statement of the problem
Although a large body of research now exists on interlanguage pragmatic development, relatively few researchers have explored the effect of types of corrective feedback on interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) development. It is strongly believed that the main function of language is communication; however, even the proficient L2 learners sometimes make mistakes due to their lack of pragmatic knowledge that result in breakdowns in communication. According to Blum-Kulka (1997), pragmatic mistakes are more unacceptable than linguistic mistakes by the interlocutors. Therefore, an attempt should be made to enhance the pragmatic knowledge of L2 learners.
There appears to be an increasing consensus among the researchers regarding the significant role of corrective feedback in second language acquisition (SLA). Due to the fact that in the context of Iran as an EFL context, there is little communication in English outside the classroom, using corrective feedbacks by teachers plays a significant role in developing ILP. With regard to the importance of pragmatic knowledge in communication and the crucial role which corrective feedbacks play in SLA, it seems that it is essential for EFL teachers to know when and how to use different kinds of corrective feedbacks and also to know which one of them is more effective in the realm of ILP development. Therefore, the present study is designed to investigate the effects of three types of corrective feedbacks on Iranian EFL learners’ interlanguage pragmatics development in the case of invitation acceptance and declination.
Research question
Based on the purpose of the study, the following research questions are formulated:
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Does corrective feedback have any effect on Iranian EFL learners’ ILP development in the case of invitation acceptance and declination?
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If any, which type of corrective feedback is more effective regarding Iranian EFL learners’ ILP development in the case of invitation acceptance and declination?