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.

In this chapter, we analysed the emails of complaints written by 48 low- and high-proficiency Vietnamese EFL learners when communicating with different audiences. The emails were elicited by means of a computerised discourse completion task developed by an international testing organisation. To understand the cognitive processes involved in the learners’ production of complaints, we also analysed think-aloud protocols provided by 8 learners randomly selected from the above pool. Our findings indicate some effect of proficiency on the learners’ pragmatic performance and decision-making processes. However, our findings also show that regardless of proficiency levels, the learners tended to neglect important writing processes. The findings suggest that the learners require pragmatic instruction as well as training in writing processes in order to carry out the email-writing task more effectively.

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