Abstract The importance of pragmatic competence in communication has been duly acknowledged in theory and research. Notwithstanding, there is compelling evidence to indicate that the development of students’ pragmatic competence has been largely ignored in ELT practices which, in turn, contributes to the plummeting level of English language learners’ proficiency. This is partly because pragmatic instruction is challenging as there might be various obstacles for its successful implementation. The current fast-growing technologies offer new exciting remedial possibilities for some of the challenges. One of these technologies is Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), which has been used in the teaching of various language domains and proved to have promising potentials. Despite the bulk of research indicating the benefits of CMC in various instructional targets, to date, a paucity of data, yet inconclusive, exists regarding the roles that CMC based instruction can play on students’ pragmatic competence development. Therefore, this study explores the effects of CMC, as compared to traditional face-to-face (FtF) instruction, on students’ pragmatic competence with a specific focus on the ability to produce requests appropriately in a social context. To this end, a non-equivalent group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was employed. Two sections of Mekelle University EFL students were taken as experimental (CMC) (n=28) and comparison (FtF) (n=28) groups. The treatment was conducted over eight weeks period. In each of the treatment sessions, the participants received metapragmatic instruction, watched video clips on requests, and they were paired with a partner to discuss some questions on the dialogue they had watched and to create their own dialogues based on the scenarios given. Later, the students engaged in a free conversation task. The CMC group participants completed the tasks via Moodle chat platform while the FtF group completed those same tasks in the v conventional FtF mode. Four indices (directness, internal modification, external modification, and appropriateness) were used to measure the dependent variable, i.e., pragmatic competence. In addition, an assessment of the CMC group participants’ reaction to the use of CMC for the pragmatic instructional purpose was also included. Three data collection instruments were used: Written Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs), Discourse Role-play Tasks (DRPTs), and questionnaires. Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques were employed. The quantitative analysis included frequency, ANCOVA, Mann-Whitney U tests and Wilcoxon Signed Ranks. To support the statistics, a linguistic analysis was also used. Accordingly, the findings revealed that the CMC group participants outperformed the FtF participants in terms of the four measures of requesting behavior: directness, internal modification, external modification, and appropriateness. This implies that text-based CMC does have a positive effect on pragmatic development by lessening the pragmatic pressure of the interaction and allowing more individualized control of the learning environment. In addition, the findings also showed that most learners had positive reaction supporting the effectiveness of CMC based instruction. Hence, in conclusion, CMC is proved to be a valuable tool for pragmatics instruction and it is recommended to be utilized in ELT. Key Words: Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), Face-to-Face (FtF), Pragmatic competence