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