Explicit and Implicit Instruction of Apology and Request: Effects on Young Persian Heritage Learners’ Pragmatic Competence (مقاله علمی وزارت علوم)

چکیده

In spite of the increasing attention paid to heritage language education, the pragmatic development of young heritage learners has not gained much momentum. In an attempt to address this gap and following the research trends of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) and heritage language education, this study aimed to unpack apology and request speech act production of young Persian heritage learners (HLs). The participants of the study were 85 lower-intermediate Iranian students (41 boys and 44 girls in grades 3 and 4) who were learning Persian as their heritage language in international schools. A researcher-made and validated Oral Discourse Completion Test (ODCT), including ten situations (five situations for each speech act), was used as the pre- and post-test to look into the influence of explicit and implicit instructions on the participants’ pragmatic production. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups and were taught for six thirty-minute sessions. The explicit group was offered direct and metapragmatic instruction, while the implicit group received activities, such as role-plays and storytelling, the purpose of which was to indirectly pick up the pragmalinguistic forms and sociopragmatic norms.The findings demonstrated that the learners' speech act production is significantly influenced by both explicit and implicit teaching. Besides, the results indicated that implicit mode could be equally functional in specific contexts, calling for a reconceptualization of instructional strategies in speech act development, which encourages curriculum and materials developers to move beyond traditional reliance on explicit instruction and adopt a more comprehensive approach that prioritizes both explicit and implicit learning.