An Investigation into the Teachability of Pragmatic Features to Korean Young Learners

The present study investigated the teachability of pragmatic features of the speech act of requests to young learners and explored the developmental patterns of their requesting realizations after the provision of the instruction given explicitly and implicitly. A total of 54 Korean elementary students participated in the study and were randomly assigned to two groups. Half of the learners received explicit pragmatic instruction which included pragmatic awareness raising activities, output practice, and metapragmatic explanation regarding sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic features of requests while the other half were implicitly instructed with an identical curriculum with the exception of the metapragmatic explanation. A discourse completion task and role-plays were employed as data collection instruments and an eclectic design was adopted to analyze the effects of the instruction. The results indicated that L2 pragmatic features of requests were teachable to Korean young learners. Particularly, explicit instruction yielded statistically significant improvements regarding their pragmatic production of requests in both within subject and between subject examinations. Further, the learners tended to notice the pragmatic features of politeness and indirectness as their requests were realized on a conventionally indirect level, employing different modal verbs and sentence patterns. These results imply that pragmatic instruction is necessary and facilitative for Korean young learners to appropriately perform requests and suggest practical implications for effective L2 teaching.