The Role of Input Enhancement in Teaching Compliments

Abstract

To date, research regarding the effectiveness of instruction on the development of interlanguage pragmatics has favored an explicit instruction of the speech acts. A question which has received scant attention is what kind of explicit instruction is more beneficial in a foreign language setting. The fact that speech acts reflect, for the most part, routinized language behavior helps learners because much of what is used in performing speech acts could be learned as prefabricated units. This study is an attempt to practically test this routinized nature of speech acts focusing on compliment giving. To this purpose, two groups were chosen as control and experimental groups and both were instructed by different procedures of input enhancement; the former was taught through Form Comparison procedure and the latter through explicit instruction using Wolfson and Manes (1980) formula of compliment giving. The result clearly indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in giving compliments, indicating once again that the routinized nature of speech acts could be utilized in helping learners develop their interlanguage pragmatics.