The effects of instruction on learners' production of appropriate and accurate suggestions

Only a few empirical studies have explored Focus on Form in the pragmatic realm. By operationalising this theoretical construct for an implicit condition, this study examined the effects of two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and implicit) on learning head acts and downgraders in suggestions. Eighty-one Spanish learners of English took one of the three sections of a computer science class for a 16-week university semester. During this period, an explicit group was exposed to metapragmatic information on suggestions for 12 h; an implicit group participated in pragmalinguistic input enhancement and recast activities; a control group never received equivalent instruction. All the participants engaged in e-mail and phone tasks as pre- and post-tests. The results revealed that both explicit and implicit groups had post-instructional improvements in their production of pragmatically appropriate and linguistically accurate suggestions. This study highlighted the ways input enhancement and recasts could be implemented at the pragmatic level. We concluded that coupled instruction of these two techniques is a sound option to teach suggestions to foreign language learners and finally provided a pedagogical implication.