A comparative study on the impact of implicit and explicit instruction on Turkish EFL learners' pragmatic competence

Pragmatic competence is a crucial component for a language learner to possess in order to communicate successfully in the target language. Within this context, this study examines the impact of implicit and explicit instruction on a sample of 66 Turkish EFL learners' pragmatic competence who were enrolled in a foundation university's preparatory program. The study involves two experimental groups and a control group. Each experimental group was given two distinct instructional approaches, implicit and explicit, on speech acts of responding, request, advice-giving, and refusal throughout the course of five weeks. A Written Discourse Completion Task was delivered to each group before and after the treatment to gauge participants' pragmatic gains. The results were analyzed with ANOVA on SPSS v.24. The findings revealed that explicit instruction was successful for some speech acts, whereas implicit instruction significantly enhanced students' pragmatic abilities. It is concluded that the implicit teaching technique expands Turkish students' pragmatic skills in English in this regard.