The effectiveness of corrective feedback for the acquisition of L2 pragmatics: An eight month investigation

Abstract This study investigates effects of pragmatics-focused instruction using different types of written corrective feedback (CF) on the development of pragmatic competence of Vietnamese learners of English as a foreign language. Five intermediate-level groups of learners who were learning syntactic downgraders for mitigating their email requests were randomly assigned to either the control or one of the four treatment conditions: instruction + clarification requests, instruction + recasts, instruction + metapragmatic feedback, and instruction + explicit correction. The performance of the treatment groups on a DCT pre-test, immediate post-test, and two follow-up tests at one and eight months after the treatments was compared with that of a control group who received only routine instruction. Results showed that the four treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group when measured at all three post-tests, but there was no difference among the treatment groups in their post-treatment scores.