An Investigation of Iranian Instructors' Methods and Techniques in Teaching Interlanguage Pragmatics

The present study is an attempt to investigate the teaching techniques and methods that instructors of private EFL institutes in Iran utilize for the instruction of interlanguage pragmatics in their EFL classes. Two hundred and thirty eight instructors from different institutes took part in this study. The data were gathered through a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The results showed that the instructors mostly made use of implicit instruction of pragmatic rules with inductive approach, role-playing, pair-work or group-work, field-experience, topics and situations to teach interlanguage pragmatics while they utilized explicit teaching of pragmatic features (explanation of politeness matters, pragmatic strategies and so on) with deductive approach, computer programs, films, email exchanges, awareness-raising and production tasks, form-focused teaching and so on to a lesser extent. Based on the findings of the study, pedagogical implications for language teachers are provided as well. It can inform language instructors of different possible ways to teach pragmatic features to learners. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.