INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT: THE EFFECT OF FORMAL INSTRUCTION ON IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS' INTERPRETATION AND USE OF SPEECH ACT OF APOLOGY

This article presents a discussion about the inclusion of explicit pragmatic instruction as a facilitative tool to develop interlanguage pragmatic competence of Iranian EFL learners' interpretation and use of speech act of apology. The questions this article is intended to answer include: 1) whether formal instruction of pragmatic knowledge play any role in the enhancement of Iranian advanced L2 learners' use of speech act of apology, and 2) whether formal instruction of pragmatic knowledge play any role in the enhancement of Iranian advanced L2 learners'interpretation of speech act of apology. To answer these questions, 60 Iranian advanced EFL learners were selected via administering the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Following the Martinez-Flor and Uso-Juan’s 6R approach (2006) two researcher made test of apology speech act were administered as the pre-test before the targeted speech act was instructed to them for 10 sessions. Two post-test of apology speech act were then administered and data were analyzed via calculating paired sample T-test. The results indicated that advanced learners showed progress both in interpretation and use.