Effect of Pragmatic Instruction versus Educational Sojourn on Knowledge of Conventional Expressions

Abstract

Conventional expressions are crucial for social interactions. However, despite their communicative value, they are not acquired even by advanced language learners. Therefore, some sort of pragmatic intervention in the form of pragmatic instruction or educational sojourn should be provided to help language learners develop their knowledge of target language conventional expressions. To this end, the current study was conducted on two groups of participants including 15 Malaysian undergraduate students of English education at a university in Malaysia and 15 Malaysian undergraduate students of English education from the same Malaysian university on a one-semester academic exchange program at a university in the United States to compare the effect of pragmatic instruction and educational sojourn on the development of knowledge of target language conventional expressions. Knowledge of target language conventional expressions was assessed through a discourse completion task. The results of independent-samples t-test revealed the superiority of the effect of pragmatic instruction to educational sojourn in developing knowledge of target language conventional expressions. The pedagogical implications of the findings suggested incorporation of pragmatic features of the target language into foreign language class instruction.