The effect of explicit pragmatics instruction on EFL students’ pragmatic competence in writing

Abstract

As pragmatics serves as a vital component of accurate communication, it represents a key area of inquiry in modern linguistics and foreign language didactics. Research previously conducted in the field of pragmatics and writing shows that EFL students’ pragmatic competence is often insufficient for them to produce pragmatically appropriate texts (Codina-Espurz & Salazar-Campillo, 2019; Zhorabekova et al., 2024; Qin et al., 2024) and that pragmatics instruction can lead to improvement of students’ pragmatic competence and writing skills (Nguyen, 2015; Chen, 2016; Deveci & Hmida, 2017). This research looks into the influence of pragmatics instruction on Czech EFL students’ writing skills from the perspective of several pragmatic aspects of texts, such as politeness, formal and informal style, or expression of speech acts and the communicative purpose. The study presents results from a quasi-experiment carried out with second-year students of the Primary school education programme at the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Brno. Overall, the findings support the benefits of explicit pragmatics instruction, especially with regard to the differences between formal and informal style and appropriate linguistic choices when expressing different speech acts and communicative goals in concrete contextual conditions.