Research into instructed pragmatics mainly comparing implicit and explicit instruction has gained salience in language teaching research in the last two decades. The present study was designed to investigate the effect of cognitive and interpersonal task-based instruction on EFL Learners’ production of two speech acts of apology and request. To this end, 125 intermediate EFL learners were conveniently sampled, and randomly assigned to four experimental groups (EG) and one control group (CG).  The four experimental groups received task-based instruction on the two speech acts of apology and request (three 30-minute sessions on each), though instruction varied in terms of general tasks types (cognitive or interpersonal) and their specific variants (cognitive: predicting (EG1; N=25) and inducing (EG2; N=25); interpersonal: co-operating (EG3; N=25) and role-play (EG4; N=25)).  The control group (N=25) did not receive any speech act-specific treatment. The participants’ speech act production was measured through a 16-item written discourse completion test (WDCT) as both the pretest and the posttest.  The findings showed the significant effect of both cognitive and interpersonal tasks, but also the greater effectiveness of the latter for speech act production. The study has implications for pragmatic task design and classroom practice. More specifically, it shows the potential of task-based instruction and interaction for EFL learners’ pragmatic development.

In the present study an attempt was made to focus on pragmatic instruction and feedback as a kind of discriminatory factor. To teach English compliment and compliment responses, this paper evaluated the relative effectiveness of input-based instruction involving 132 Iranian EFL learners at intermediate and advanced levels. The main purpose of the study was to investigate to what extent instruction affected learners’ knowledge and ability to use compliment strategies. Students were divided into three groups: explicit, implicit and control. They were taught common strategies regarding how to compliment and respond to it. Whereas the explicit groups received instruction by means of explicit feedback on the use of appropriate compliments, the implicit groups were provided with instruction plus implicit feedback. The results of the data analysis based on the pre-tests, post-tests and follow up tests including discourse-completion tasks and self-assessment tests indicated that although instruction had a positive effect on the development of students’ socio-pragmatic competence of both explicit and implicit groups, the explicit group did better. The study may have some implications for teaching compliment forms which have been forgotten somehow in EFL classrooms today.

Textbooks have been very significant and valuable for our precedents because education is very significant and through it, everybody can achieve fulfillment. Knowledge and its application can be achieved through the person’s interaction with society, worldview and his intellectual development. The criteria of social discipline, behavioral values snd civilization should evoke knowledge in the students. Therefore, a textbook should benefit from contemporary linguistic culture which is summarized as follows:1 - Debate and conversation, question and answer.2 - Storytelling, narrative and representation of characters and imitation.3 - Reports and speeches, words and conversations.4 - Giving directions and instructions.5 - Holding personal interviews and managing meetings,6 - Describing realistic things, arguments, defending their opinion, explanation, dialogue, analysis, survey and commentary.These aspects must be observed in the language and style of the book when a person wants to develop educational materials because these factors implicitly form the ideology of the students who are the next generation of our society.

This study investigates whether digitally mediated instruction enriched with targeted pragmatic intervention promotes Indonesian university students’ critical thinking in academic writing and how this cognitive development subsequently relates to the strengthening of academic politeness competence. A quasi-experimental pre-test–post-test design was employed with undergraduate students enrolled in an academic writing course. The experimental group received digital learning integrated with explicit pragmatic instruction, while the control group followed standard digital writing activities. The results indicated that students in the experimental group demonstrated significantly greater improvements in multidimensional critical thinking compared with those in the control group. These cognitive gains were accompanied by stronger development in academic politeness competence, reflected in higher post-test performance and more consistent use of interactional discourse resources in academic writing. Correlation analysis further revealed a strong positive association between post-instruction critical thinking and academic politeness competence. Overall, the findings suggest that digitally mediated instruction enriched with pragmatic guidance can support the development of academic politeness through improvements in students’ critical thinking.

Interlanguage pragmatics, as an inseparable part of communicative competence, has been emphasized as an ultimate objective in language learning. This study explored the perceptions of Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) students regarding interlanguage pragmatics and the impact of textbooks tasks on shaping their pragmatic competence. To accomplish this objective, 137 senior EFL students from 12 state universities, ranging from 23 to 28 years, were selected based on convenience sampling procedures. The researcher utilized teachers' perception questionnaires, first used by Jandt (2011), to investigate the students' perceptions. A semi-structured interview as well as a document analysis of the university English textbooks were applied. Moreover, thematic analysis was carried out regarding the interview. Themes were identified for meaningful interpretations based on a document analysis to investigate if they were either linguistically or pragmatically oriented. Results from quantitative analysis revealed that university English students specified a perception that pragmatic knowledge is as imperative as linguistic knowledge. Besides, by analyzing the qualitative data via the participants’ interviews, the researcher extracted three codes, including the inadequacy or the quantity of pragmatic information, the suitability or the quality of pragmatic information, and also cross-cultural diversities. Moreover, students acknowledged that meta-pragmatic information is lacking in ELT textbooks, and the textbooks provide learners with more linguistic resources. The findings of the study suggest that university English instructors require to be more aware of pragmatic knowledge. In addition, they should design some pragmatically oriented practice for students to become pragmatically competent.