Arab Educational Information Network

Interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) literature has less contributed to the understanding of how L2 pragmatic competence (PC) is developed. Additionally, previous research interested in developing PC through pedagogical intervention has been confined to rather small sets of speech acts such as requests and apologies but has overlooked others such as refusals. Accordingly, in an attempt to see how ILP stage is developed, the present study tries to investigate whether pragmatic transfer (PT) exists in the ILP stage when the Iraqi foreign language learners make refusals in the American context prior to any instruction, whether explicit instruction has relative effects on developing these learners’ refusal PC and whether incorporating an awareness raising (AR) perspective during the explicit instructional session makes them aware of the American refusal pragma linguistic as well as the sociodramas aspects and more aware of the cross-cultural differences between both languages; i.e. Iraqi as the L1 and American as an FL so as to avoid any instance of pragmatic failure (PF). An eclectic communicatively oriented technique has been proposed to help delivering explicitly the L2 targeted speech act through activities involving description, explanation and practicing of the targeted feature in FL classroom setting. Forty-four Iraqi first-year college students studying in the department of English, College of Arts, University of Mosul were the subjects in the present study identically assigned to two groups: treatment and control groups. Three written Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) were conducted. The findings obtained confirm that PT from Iraqi refusals did exist when the subjects made American refusals before any instruction. Explicit instruction did make effective development in the treatment subjects’ PC to approach the L2 native-like, and conducting AR procedure during the explicit instructional sessions did accelerate L2 pragmatic development. (Published abstract)