This study followed a pre-test/post-test/delayed post-test design to investigate the long-term impact of metapragmatic instruction on learners’ ability to modify email requests. Twenty-five Spanish university students with an upper-intermediate proficiency level in English participated in the study. Over a two-week period, they received six hours of instruction on request modifiers by applying a form-function-context mapping framework (Taguchi 2011). Target request modifiers in written Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) were analysed for frequency and variety. Learners’ self-evaluations of email appropriateness were also used to determine their degree of confidence when producing request modifiers. The within-group comparisons revealed that learners made a significant progress in their use of request modifiers and confidence level immediately after instruction and two months later. These comparisons, however, also indicated that some types of request modifiers were more amenable to instruction than others.
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Martínez-Flor, Alicia, and Esther Usó-Juan. 2020. “Teaching L2 Speech Acts.” In Developmental and Clinical Pragmatics, ed. by Klaus P. Schneider, and Elly Ifantidou, 269–300. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin.
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Taguchi, Naoko, and Youjin Kim. 2016. “Collaborative Dialogue in Learning Pragmatics: Pragmatic-related Episodes as an Opportunity for Learning Request-making.” Applied Linguistics 37 (3): 416–437.
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Woodfield, Helen, and Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis. 2010. “I Just Need More Time: A Study of Native and Non-native Requests to Faculty for an Extension.” Multilingua 29 (1): 77–118.
Xiao-le, Gu. 2011. “The Effect of Explicit and Implicit Instructions of Request Strategies.” Intercultural Communication Studies 20 (1): 104–123.
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Safont, Pilar
2024. Multilingual cyberpragmatics in instructional settings. Exploring gender and age effects in Catalan, Spanish and English email requests. International Journal of Multilingualism 21:3 ► pp. 1494 ff.
Martín-Laguna, Sofía
2023. Metadiscourse Learning Trajectories in Multilingual Learners: A Focus on Attitude Markers and Hedges. In New Trends on Metadiscourse, ► pp. 105 ff.
2023. Los reclamos por correo electrónico: efectos de la instrucción pragmática con enfoque por tareas en el español L2 Emails of complaints: the effects of task-based pragmatic instruction in L2 Spanish. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching 10:1 ► pp. 14 ff.
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