The Effect of Implicit and Explicit Types of Feedback on Learners’ Pragmatic Development

Having adopted a pretest- posttest design with a control group, this study investigated the effects of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on pragmatic development of Iranian EFL learners. Having received explicit instruction, forty intermediate participants in this study received explicit type of feedback (matalinguistic explanation) and implicit type of feedback (recast) in response to any utterance containing an error in doing the role plays of refusals. One week after a treatment lasting 10 days, pragmatic acquisition was measured by a Discourse Completion Test. Results of Chi-square indicated that both treatment groups outperformed the control group and the proportion of using all subcomponents of polite refusal strategy except for one of the subcomponents outweighed in explicit group compared with implicit group.