Teaching pragmatic awareness of spoken requests to Chinese EAP learners in the UK: Is explicit instruction effective? Nicola Halenko, Christian Jones * School of Languages and International Studies, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 2HE, United Kingdom Received 16 July 2010; revised 24 February 2011; accepted 24 February 2011 Abstract The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of explicit interventional treatment on developing pragmatic awareness and production of spoken requests in an EAP context (taken here to mean those studying/using English for academic purposes in the UK) with Chinese learners of English at a British higher education institution. The study employed an experimental design over a 12 week period with 26 students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction. Performance was measured based on a pre, immediate and delayed post test structure using Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs). The findings firstly revealed that explicit instruction facilitated development of pragmatically appropriate request language, although this was not noticeably maintained after a six week period. Secondly, despite the potential advantage that the second language environment affords to pragmatic development, this was not necessarily instrumental in enhancing competence. Finally, study abroad (ESL) (taken here to mean those studying English in an English speaking country as opposed to EFL learners studying English in their home country) learners found pragmatic instruction valuable, which suggests practitioners should consider incorporating this at the pre departure stage in order for learners to be more adequately prepared for communicating in similar EAP contexts. Ó 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Keywords: Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP); EAP; Study abroad; Requests; Instructional effects 1. Introduction The motivation behind the present study was that despite students’ long term residency in the UK, the experience of staff at a British higher education institution showed that non-native speaker (NNS) students were often unable to produce pragmatically appropriate language in interactions inside and outside the classroom. Indeed, many staff reported that learners with an adequate level of grammatical and lexical competence to undertake an undergraduate programme struggled with simple speech acts such as requesting information from a tutor. This meant their language could be perceived as rude as they may not adhere to expectations of positive or negative politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987), as appropriate to the context. In addition, their language may lack the expected moves of such speech acts, making them difficult to follow and meaning tutors had to work hard to ‘fill in the gaps’. Staff also * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 (0) 1772 893150; fax: þ44 (0) 1772 892909. E-mail addresses: NHalenko@uclan.ac.uk (N. Halenko), CJones3@uclan.ac.uk (C. Jones). 0346-251X/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.system.2011.05.003 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com System 39 (2011) 240e250 www.elsevier.com/locate/system