Profiling the learning of pragmatic competencies in tertiary EFL classrooms in Vietnam: critical reflections on the current debate around the efficacy of instructional pedagogies

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)In recent years, a considerable scholarly literature has accumulated regarding the most effective techniques for EFL students to develop what is termed “pragmatic competence” (Canale, 1980, 1988; Canale & Swain, 1980; Chomsky, 1980), a notion which includes “illocutionary competence, or the knowledge of the pragmatic conventions for performing acceptable language functions, and sociolinguistic competence, or knowledge of the sociolinguistic conventions for performing language functions appropriately in a given context” (Canale, 1988, p.90). Consistent with this general objective of communicative language acquisition, a pedagogic debate has emerged which differentiates two approaches to pragmatic competence. These approaches are deemed to be the two most dominant and effective modes of instructional techniques designed to achieve this goal. These techniques or heuristic approaches have become known as ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ instructional pedagogies. In the case of the explicit pragmatic language acquisition process, the learner is introduced to the range of explicit rules which are reckoned to be foundational to the form of linguistic constructions required, when these rules function as a coherent combinatory set. On the other hand, the heuristic of implicit pedagogy “makes no overt reference to rules or forms” (Doughty, 2007, p.265). In other words, implicit instruction involves drawing the students’ attention to conversational contexts of usage, and, exhibiting speech which depends upon rule-governed pragmatics discovered by the students through their actual participation in the conversational exchange. Unlike the explicit instructional pedagogy, the implicit technique involves no direct propaedeutic information overt rule-learning, but only enough information as is required for the students themselves to direct their own attention to relatively consistent and repeating patterns of pragmatic competence. The central objective of this study is to critically evaluate the current debate between the respective proponents of explicit and implicit instructional pedagogies for the acquisition of pragmatic competence. The intention is to canvass the scholarly literature, with an aim to providing a comprehensive account of each of these instructional processes. Further, the scholarly literature on the comparative success of explicit versus implicit instruction is critically evaluated. Although it may be the case that the majority of studies indicate that explicit instruction outperforms implicit instruction, there are other researchers who believe they have shown that implicit instruction is actually more effective. This thesis makes a valuable contribution to the scholarly literature in the field by providing the first comprehensive and critically oriented analysis of the conventional debate. This study assesses these discrepancies by researching the experiences of students in Vietnam and paralleling the studies referred to it in the conventional debate on pragmatic competence. A total of 124 students at a participating university agreed to participate and were randomly assigned by the researcher into three groups Thus, the evidence provided from this study to gives insight into the conclusions traditionally drawn from the debate. The speech act used in the Vietnamese study proposed is based on the concept of ‘refusal’ as an example of one of the “major cross-cultural sticking point[s] for EFL students” (Beebe et al., 1990, p.56). Not knowing how to appropriately refuse an invitation, respond to suggestions, or participate effectively in spoken interaction, can result in misunderstanding and breakdown in communication. In turn, the lack of pragmatic competence can give rise to a breach of socio-cultural etiquette. Then the current debate about explicit and implicit teaching strategies is considered. The aim is then to determine the extent to which the underlying design of the framework within which the debate has been structured serves unnecessarily to restrict the range of plausible interpretations that can be given to the data upon which its significance and outcome of the debate depends. Professor Laura has recently developed a conceptually diagnostic tool, ‘presuppositional analysis’. Essentially, the objective of presuppositional analysis is to tease out the foundational assumptions, which define the structure of the framework within which the evaluation of the evidence gathered from testing is itself informed and conditioned. In other words, the way in which we interpret observational data, to use just one example, will inevitably depend on a theory of observation within which observational evidence can be evaluated. Professor Laura gives the example of a straight stick which is placed in a glass or see-through bucket. Our cognitive faculty of perception tells us that the stick is bent, but we conclude that the stick remains straight because we have a theory of observation against which we can correctly translate discrepancies of this kind in the appropriate way. In essence this second part of the thesis will aim to critically evaluate the extent to which the current debate polarizes the relationship between explicit and implicit instructional approaches. I shall endeavor to determine in the light of the literature and my own study whether the logical form of the very question posed by the traditional convention thus limits the scope of the debate. According to Professor Laura, it is unclear whether the methodological design of the debate question presupposes what he refers to as an ‘exclusive disjunction’. The disjunctive formulation is that either the explicit approach is the most effective instructional process for pragmatic language acquisition, or the implicit instructional approach is stronger. It would seem that the limiting factor is the exclusivity of the disjunctional clause, namely, if one approach is deemed to be most effective, then the other process is, by entailment, covertly excluded and marginalized as a less effective instructional process. The aim of this section of the thesis will be to determine whether the nature of the debate is itself structurally limiting, and thus fails to do justice to either of the two heuristic pragmatic language learning approaches. One of the techniques relevant to the diagnostic analysis of the explicit/implicit debate is that the framework of interpretation is grounded in dualism, namely either the explicit strategy works best or it does not. From this it follows that the evaluation of the debate will, as Professor Laura puts it, itself be inevitably dualistic. In other words, either the explicit, or rule governed strategy will be the most effective pedagogic approach or the implicit strategy will be. The point is that the research design for the projected outcome of the debate is in essence structured in terms of an ‘exclusive disjunction’. If one clause of the ‘disjunct’ is valid, then it conceptually excludes the validity of the second clause, in turn circumscribing the scope and limits of the debate discourse itself. This study argues that to a large extent, this debate may rest on a presuppositional design that polarizes the relationship between explicit and implicit instructional approaches. In this sense the design of the studies that follow rely themselves on presumption of logic which can serve to circumscribe the boundaries of debate prematurely