An Overview on Explicit and Implicit instructions on Learners’ Pragmatic Awareness in Making Request in English

Abstract

One of the important part of the pragmatics studies in recent years is about the intercultural communication. EFL learners should know both grammatical competence and also sociolinguistic rules to use the language in an appropriate context. This review explores the effect of the explicit and implicit instruction on the learners’ attention in the production of the speech act of request. Pragmatics includes “the study of how speakers use and understand speech acts” (Richards and Schmidt 2002). Moreover, pragmatics plays a very important role in the production and perception of the language. That is why interlocutors should have enough pragmatic knowledge to produce and perceive the proper and intended speech acts based on context. Therefore, having pragmatic competence is one of the key factors in the process of communication. Pragmatic competence in foreign language contexts is defined as the knowledge of communicative action or speech acts, how to perform it, and the ability to utilize the language in proper ways based on the context or contextual factors (Kasper 1997; Kasper & Roever 2005).