Politeness without payoff? Evaluating the effect of a short pragmatics intervention on L1 request writing

Abstract

This study explores the introduction of pragmatics concepts—speech acts, conversational implicature, and politeness—into L1 language education and its impact on students' writing. Despite the well-documented benefits of pragmatics instruction in L2 contexts, its application in L1 settings remains under-researched. Using a quasi-experimental research design with switching replications, involving 241 Dutch pre-university students, the current study examined whether a short intervention in which core pragmatics concepts were introduced would benefit the quality of students’ written requests, their self-efficacy in writing them and the associated perceived mental effort. Contrary to expectations, the intervention did not manage to secure any improvements on these variables. While this result may be due to the nature of the intervention in terms of its design principles or duration, we also found evidence that the number of words students wrote during the tests significantly declined over time, revealing a decrease in motivation for the writing tasks. This appears to be a major contributing factor to the results. Based on these results, the paper discusses meaningful ways forward for future research on this topic, emphasizing the need for a better understanding of student learning through improved fidelity measures and as well as following strategies to maintain student engagement during repeated testing.