Research on pragmatic competence involving various approaches has received increasing attention since 1980 when interlanguage pragmatics began to flourish. The aim of this systematic review was to examine and categorize contemporary studies on pragmatic competence of EFL and ESL students and to reveal potential moderators, compare results of…

People often speak indirectly. For example, "It's cold in here" might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders' inferences about a speaker's intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker's mental states, that is, "mentalizing?" We…

This study investigates the effects of input-based and output-based instructions on the acquisition of second language (L2) request modifiers. Four intact classes were randomly assigned to textual enhancement (TE), input flooding (IF), output-based instruction (OI), and control (CO) groups. The TE group watched some captioned videos on requests…

A large amount of literature exists on how native speakers derive and process pragmatic inferences, yet few studies have examined the issue in second language learners, despite a controversial debate of second language (L2) ultimate attainment of phenomena situated at external interfaces. This study contributes to the debate on the integration of…

Language is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, demanding explanation in a theory of human cognition. However, language presents unique practical challenges for quantitative empirical research, making many linguistic theories difficult to test at naturalistic scales. Artificial neural network language models (LMs) provide a new tool for studying…

The onset of COVID-19 has prompted world language professionals to reconceptualize best practices in second language (L2) teaching and research during a time of limited interaction due to social distancing across the globe (Morris, 2022). Not surprisingly, study abroad programs that once fostered communicative and intercultural development were…

Aka (2019) conducted an year-long large-scale study demonstrating that Japanese high school students who undertook extensive reading performed better than a control group who undertook grammatical instruction. Those showing the greatest gains were those of lower and intermediate proficiency. The students' achievement was measured in terms of…

The present study investigates the effectiveness of consciousness-raising approach in interpreting conversational implicature using audiovisual input. The study was conducted on 126 Saudi female students at the Department of English Language and Literature at AlImam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh. The experimental group was…

Different communities assess social distance, social power, rights and obligations, and degree of imposition used in specific speech acts differently. As a result of this difference, foreign language learners are likely to make sociopragmatic failure. This kind of failure is harder to correct because of the learners' justifiable sensitivity in…

The present paper explored how plays could contribute to pragmatic development when employed as a medium of implicit or explicit instruction. 80 undergraduate English-major students were divided into four experimental groups two of which were literary and two nonliterary. Implicit Literary, as one of the literary groups was exposed to…

The present study investigates the prosody/pragmatics interface in TBLT by extending the traditional morphological focus-on-form to a focus on intonational forms, with Spanish declaratives and imperatives. Twenty-eight intermediate L2 Spanish learners were assigned to one of two conditions that differed in the type of focus-on-form present during…

Recent findings in the field of pragmatics have revealed that pragmatic accuracy (knowledge) and pragmatic speed (processing ability) function as two distinct and non-parallel components of pragmatic competence. Anderson's adaptive control of thought--rational (ACT-R) model, which emphasises the development of skill through repeated practice,…

This study investigates the relative effectiveness of four types of input-enhanced instruction on the development of Iranian EFL learners' production of pragmatically appropriate and grammatically accurate suggestions. Over a 16-week course, input delivered through video clips was enhanced differently in four intact classes: (1) metapragmatic…

This study compares the effect of using corpus-based materials and activities for the instruction of pragmatic routines under two conditions: implementing direct corpus searches by learners during classroom instruction and working with teacher-developed corpus-based materials. The outcome is compared to a repeated-test control group. Pragmatic…

The present study examined the effects of two types of input-based approaches--combination of pragmalinguistics- and sociopragmatics-focused instruction (CI) and sociopragmatics-focused instruction (SI) on learners' recognizing and producing English request hedges. 45 Japanese learners of English participated in the study. Treatment group…