Pragmatic comprehension of apology, request and refusal: An investigation on the effect of consciousness-raising video-driven prompts

Recent  research  in  interlanguage  pragmatics  (ILP)  has  substantiated  that  some  aspects  of pragmatics are amenable to instruction in the second or foreign language classroom. However, there  are  still  controversies  over  the  most  conducive  teaching  approaches  and  the  required materials.  Therefore,  this  study  aims  to  investigate  the  relative  effectiveness  of  consciousness-raising video-driven prompts on the comprehension of the three speech acts of apology, request, and  refusal  on  seventy  eight  (36  male  and  42  female)  upper-intermediate  Persian  learners  of English  who  were  randomly  assigned  to  four  groups    (metapragmatic,  form-search,  role  play, and  control).  The  four  groups  were  exposed  to  45  video  vignettes  (15  for  each  speech  act) extracted from different episodes of Flash Forward,  Stargate TV Series and Annie Hall Film for nine  60-minute  sessions  of  instruction  twice  a  week.    Results  of  the  multiple  choice  discourse completion test (MDCT) indicated that learners’ awareness  of  apologies,  requests  and  refusals benefit  from  all  three  types  of  instruction,  but  the  results  of  the  Post  hoc  test  of  Tukey  (HSD) illustrated  that  the  metapragmatic  group  outperformed  the  other  treatment  groups,  and  that form-search group had a better performance than role-play and control groups.