Effects of pragmatic instruction on EFL teenagers’ apologetic email writing: Comprehension, production, and cognitive processes

Abstract

This study examined the effects of explicit instruction on EFL learners’ apologetic email writing in terms of comprehension, production, and cognitive processes in pragmatic performance. Participants were 30 Taiwanese EFL eighth graders who received a 10-week pragmatic training on email apologies. Research instruments were a multiple-choice test (MCT), a written discourse completion task (WDCT), and retrospective verbal reports (RVRs). The results showed that the participants obtained higher scores in the MCTs after the instruction, illustrating the facilitative effects on the learners’ comprehension of email writing. As for the production, the learners made overall progress in email writing in the posttest. Regarding the cognitive processes, analysis of the RVRs revealed that after the treatment, the learners’ pragmalinguistic awareness was promoted in their paying more attention to pragmalinguistic features and planning their email writing according to the email moves more frequently. The findings were discussed with implications for pedagogy and future research.

Using Google Classroom to Increase Students Motivation to Learn English at SMP Negeri 1 Limboto Gorontalo

“…This demonstrates that students perceptions of the effectiveness of utilizing Google Classroom as part of their educational experience are relatively positive, as they do care and pay attention on assignments given by students on Google Classroom and willing to complete it on time. This evidence is similar to the one stated by experts (Gardner, 2001;Lin & Wang, 2020;Santos, 2021). In particular, the greatest scores associated with handing out tasks through Google Classroom were 72 percent, which corresponds to as many as 17 students.…”

“…The findings show that the intrinsic motivation of the students in learning English received quite positive responses in almost all indicators of it, as students mainly preferred a good statement. This shows that the utilization of Google Classroom in teaching English in that school can bring a good impact and make students become highly motivated in their learning, which is in agreement several theories that has been explained (Lin & Wang, 2020;Santos, 2021).…”

“…According to the statistics in Table 2, the data acquired for negative questions that should elicit a positive reaction from students got the most answers in Agreed and Strongly agree. This indicates that students level of dedication to their education is affected by Google Classroom, which has been explained in several studies (Lin & Wang, 2020;Santos, 2021). The vast majority of the students came to the conclusion that they would rather focus on their own endeavors than becoming involved with the complexities of Google Classroom.…”

“…In addition, another reason to be considered is that teachers should update learning media to increase quality of teaching. Effective media usage improves learning, achievement, and motivation of students, according to a prior research (Lin & Wang, 2020). Since method and medium influence teaching and learning (Clark, 1994), setting, learner qualities, and task or reaction are all important.…”

Promoting the Sustainable Development of Rural EFL Learners’ Email Literacy through a Facebook Project

“…Chen et al [52] highlighted the importance of incorporating email-writing into language pedagogy, arguing that "email is not a monolithic genre but is inherently fluid" (p. 28), reflecting interpersonal communication and negotiation abilities. Previous studies on email literacy have focused primarily on requests and apologies (e.g., [46,[53][54][55][56]) and comparatively less on invitation, which is also a frequently occurring speech act in student-teacher interactions [57]. These studies showed that the emails produced by L2 learners are different from those produced by native speakers of the target language.…”