과업기반 수업을 활용한 초등영어 요청화행 지도의 효과

A task-based approach to teaching requests for EFL elementary school students

The purpose of this study is to investigate a task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach to teaching pragmatic competence for EFL elementary English learners focusing on requests. A series of 15 task-based lessons was developed to teach requests to 6th-grade English learners for eight weeks. In terms of choosing target request expressions, various request expressions were initially extracted from the English curriculum and textbooks and additional request strategies were added. Three target tasks that require request expressions were designed, incorporating pragmatic social variables such as power, distance, and imposition. Each task differed in terms of difficulty and complexity. Students’ pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence were evaluated using a discourse completion test (DCT) as pre- and post-tests. Rating criteria, assessing pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence, were also developed and two raters evaluated the learners’ pragmatic production on DCT items to ensure inter-rater reliability. The findings revealed that the TBLT approach was effective in teaching EFL elementary school students’ request competence in terms of both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic components. We discuss potential challenges and directions in teaching pragmatic competence for elementary school students in Korea.