Impact of Collaborative Output-Based Instruction on EFL Learners’ Awareness of the Speech Act of Apology

A sizeable body of research into instructed pragmatics roots from the noticing hypothesis: comparing im-plicit and explicit instruction. It is only recently that other theories, including the output hypothesis, have been researched as possible explanations of interlanguage pragmatic development. Pursuing the same line of research, the present study addressed the impact of collaborative output (CO) on the production of apologies. To this end, 51 EFL learners comprising a CO group (N=26) and a control group (N=25) par-ticipated in the study. The CO group underwent six 45-minute sessions of instruction on apologies, in which they received input in the form of written speech-act contained situations, followed by paired dis-course completion tasks. The results of the statistical analyses showed the significant improvement of the CO group on a 15-item written discourse completion test serving as both the pretest and the posttest. The findings warrant CO-based instruction as an apt approach to the instruction of pragmatics.