The Effect of Pragmalinguistic Focus on Form on Iranian EFL Learners’ Production of Refusal Forms: with a Focus on Marked Recasts and Elicitation

The role of instruction to develop learners’ pragmatic competence in both second and foreign language contexts has recently motivated a great deal of research. However, most of this research has adopted an explicit instructional approach with only a few studies attempting to operationalize a more implicit condition for pragmatic learning. This study was set up to reexamine the effects of pragmalinguistic focus on form on Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic development and to compare the effects of two feedback types (marked recasts and elicitations) in raising the learners’ awareness in producing appropriate English refusals. Adopting a pretest-posttest design, the study included 21 participants with two experimental groups (marked recast group versus elicitation group) but no control group, adopting a pretest-posttest design. Both of the groups performed role plays. In marked recast group, the researcher provided the learners with marked recasts while in elicitation group, he used elicitation strategies to deal with erroneous utterances. The results from a written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) showed the effectiveness of pragmalinguistic focus on form on the participants’ pragmatic development and revealed that although both of the techniques were effective, there were no significant differences between them in raising the learners’ pragmatic ability to produce appropriate refusal forms. The findings of the study suggest that pragmatic instruction, which seems necessary, can be operationalized through both recast and elicitation, as two techniques of Focus on Form.