The efficiency of short stories in teaching speech acts as a part of pragmatic competence and related pragmatic awareness levels of English language instructors at tertiary level

This study investigates the effectiveness of explicit purposive instruction through short stories on the acquisition of speech acts by Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Turkey. Secondly, it explores the extent to which EFL instructors are aware of pragmatic value of short stories in teaching speech acts and their actual practices in the classrooms. In line with these purposes, two separate groups as EFL learners and instructors were involved in this research. To assess the efficiency of short stories in teaching speech acts as part of pragmatic competence, data were collected from 28 pre- intermediate Turkish learners of English as a foreign language through assigning them in two groups, one treatment and one control group, each containing 14 learners. Participants in both groups were given a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) as a pre-test and a post-test. Learners in the treatment group received an explicit instruction through two short stories with role- playing and simulation, while the control group did not. The instruction lasted 4 weeks. Pre-Test and Post-Test Results indicated that the instruction on speech acts made the treatment group outscored the control group. In other words, explicit instruction based on the use of short stories improved learners? speech act comprehension significantly.The second objective of this study is to gather some information about whether foreign language instructors were aware of the pragmatic value of short stories in teaching process. Data were collected from 20 EFL instructors via a structured questionnaire, containing two parts. The first section was to measure pragmatic awareness levels of EFL instructors. In the second section, their actual practices of using short stories as pragma-linguistic source in the classrooms were investigated. Findings illustrated that according to most of these instructors participating in this study, short stories have a positive impact on foreign language teaching, and so most of them always utilize short stories as pragma-linguistic sources in EFL settings.