Investigating the Effect of Cultural Distance and Pragmatic Instruction on the Development of Pragmatic Competence

Cultural distance which is defined as the extent to which the shared norms and values in one country differ from those in another country (Hofstede, 2001) is considered to be a strong predictor of pragmatic competence. In this regard, the current study investigated the effect of cultural distance from the target language community and pragmatic instruction on the development of comprehension and production aspects of pragmatic competence. Participants of the study were 44 undergraduate students at Yamanashi Gakuin University: 20 German exchange students who based on the values on six cultural dimensions investigated by Hofestede (2010) were considered culturally closer to American culture and 24 Japanese students who based on the same criteria were considered culturally more distant from American culture. Data were collected through a pragmatic comprehension test measuring comprehension of conversational implicatures adopted from Taguchi (2007, 2008, 2012) and a discourse completion task measuring production of a variety of speech acts adopted from Bardovi-Harlig (2009). The experiment involved the administration of pragmatic comprehension and production tests to all participants of the study at the beginning of the study, conducting pragmatic instruction for 12 sessions in the form of metapragmatic explanation of implicatures and speech acts contained in selected reading and listening materials, and the administration of both tests again following intervention. The comparison of the performance of both groups over pragmatic tests revealed that cultural distance from the target language community is a strong predictor of pragmatic comprehension and production abilities. Also, the comparison of pre-test and post-test results demonstrated that pragmatic instruction has a significant effect on the development of both comprehension and production aspects of pragmatic competence.

An educationist, linguist, and research methodologist, Dr. Vahid Rafieyan, is an associate professor of English at Yamanashi Gakuin University. He holds a Ph. D in TESOL from University Sains Malaysia and has been teaching English since 2003. His main areas of expertise include but are not limited to pragmatics and second language acquisition. He is an expert in both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and has been conducting research studies since 2013. His leisure activity is reading and writing fantasies.