The Effect of Consciousness-Raising Listening Prompts on the Development of the Speech Act of Apology in an Iranian EFL Context

In line with the previous bodies of research, the present study ininterlanguage pragmatics (ILP) proved that some aspects of pragmatics were amenable toinstruction even in foreign language (FL) contexts. However, there are stillcontroversies over the best convenient teaching techniques and appropriate materials.Moreover, production-oriented approaches to teaching pragmatics caused scant practicalstudies over the perception of the frequent speech acts such as apology conducted todate. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relative effectiveness ofconsciousness-raising (C-R) listening prompts on the development of the speech act ofapology on 64 (34 male and 30 female ranging in age from 17 to 27) upper-intermediatePersian learners of English who were randomly assigned to two groups of 32. While theexperimental group took advantages of listening prompts with C-R or input enhancementactivities, the control group received the same listening prompts without any C-Ractivities. The two groups were then exposed to 20 conversation extracts during 10sessions of instruction including different apology situations taken from InterchangeSeries, Tactics for Listening Series, American Headway, and Top Notch. The results ofthe multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT) indicated that learners in theexperimental group benefited more from C-R activities via listening prompts andoutperformed the control group. In addition, the results revealed that male and femalelearners’ development in this pragmatic aspect of language did differ significantly. Thefindings throw light on practical as well as pedagogical implications of ILP and providesuggestions for English as a second language/English as a foreign language (ESL/EFL)teachers and materials developers