Developing pragmatic competence of B level tertiary students in english preparatory classes

This research explores the effect of strategy-based instruction on pragmatic competence of 62 tertiary level students studying at İstanbul Sabahattin Zaim University in İstanbul. To be more specific, (1) the effect of strategy-based instruction on appropriate use of speech acts, (2) awareness about speech act modification strategies, and (3) perceptions of learners about the effectiveness of instruction were examined. Strategy-based instruction involves the integration of explicit or implicit teaching activities to create autonomous learners and achieve the learning goals.To integrate strategy-based instruction and create autonomous learners, experimental group conducted activities adapted by taxonomy of strategies for learning speech acts and used language biography part of European language portfolio. Language Biography was used as a tool to do self-reflection and self-assessment. Among mixed methods study designs, the current research adopts explanatory design as qualitative analysis was conducted to explain quantitative results in detail. The present study employed a true-experimental research design that involves a treatment process, pretest-posttest, an experimental group and a control group. Multiple data collection tools which are open ended written discourse completion test (OWDCT), oral discourse completion test (ODCT) and focus group interview were utilized. Quantitative analysis indicated that experimental group outperformed control group in appropriate use of speech acts. Analysis of numbers and frequencies of modification strategies, modals of politeness, and amount of errors indicated that experimental group exhibited a better performance in producing speech acts. Moreover, analysis of focus group interviews showed that students had positive perceptions about the strategy-based instruction and use of Language Biography.