Instructional Effects, Retrospective Verbal Protocols, and Conventional Expressions: A Mixed-Method Approach

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2025

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National Foreign Language Resource Center

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15

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1

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11

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Abstract

Conventional expressions (CEs) have regained importance in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) research since the early 21st century (e.g., Wray, 1999). CEs are everyday specific recurring expressions whose pivotal role in social interactions is highlighted (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009). Since successful communication heavily relies on them, teaching them is capital, especially in English as a foreign language (EFL) environments, which have been identified as impoverished settings (Eslami & Eslami-Rasekh, 2008). There, pragmatic learning and teaching opportunities should be provided frequently to further enhance adult EFL pragmatic acquisition (e.g., Taguchi, 2015). Attempting to contribute to research in (1) CEs, (2) pragmatic instruction, and (3) retrospective verbal protocols (RVPs) in pragmatic production, this investigation focuses on the instructional effects on oral production of CEs as reflected on students’ answers to RVPs. A four-week pretest-posttest-delayed-posttest research design was implemented on a cohort of 46 college EFL students assigned to one control or one experimental group. Data were gathered via a computer-delivered oral discourse completion task (ODCT) involving 15 social communicative situations. Quantitative results unveiled statistically significant differences between groups at posttest and delayed posttest and a significant increase in pragmatic production across times for the experimental group only. Qualitative results showed that students used different topics to explain pragmatic production and differences among topics. These results support existing findings on the effect of instruction. In addition, RVPs proved beneficial to understand results more comprehensively, showcasing the benefit of including students’ reflection on their pragmatic learning. To end the chapter, some pedagogical implications are proposed.

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Citation

Arrufat‐Marques, M. (2025). Instructional effects, retrospective verbal protocols, and conventional expressions: A mixed-method approach. In M. González-Lloret, J. M. Sykes, & J. K. Yoshioka (Eds.), Pragmatics & Language Learning (Vol. 15, pp. 1–11). National Foreign Language Resource Center, University of Hawai‘i. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/75351

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1-11

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Book chapter

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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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