Teaching learners to appropriately mitigate requests

Abstract

It is commonly recognized that, for lecturers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in a university setting, the goal of their teaching is to develop learners' ability to communicate appropriately in this language. This means that teaching practices should pay attention not only to the key features of the linguistic system of English, but also to its pragmatic norms since lack of this knowledge may impede communication. Consequently, language learners need to be exposed to appropriate input in the classroom. In order to help lecturers in this task, it is the aim of this paper to present a learner-based instructional method designed to develop learners' pragmatic ability when using request mitigating devices in EFL. The rationale behind the selection of this pragmatic feature is discussed in the paper together with an explanation of the proposed teaching method.