Abstract:
Effective communication skills play an integral role in learners’ academic endeavour
and daily life interaction. However, in EFL settings where learners do not have
adequate exposure to the target language (TL) native speakers’ social rules and
sociocultural norms, developing their communicative competence ability is a
challenging task. In connection with this, literature advocates the incorporation of
pragmatic instruction (PI) to enhance EFL learners’ communicative competence.
Hence, this study investigated the effects of incorporating PI in EFL to enhance
learners’ communicative competence. The study employed a pretest-posttest quasi
experimental study design. Two intact sections (sections 5 and 6) students of Bahir
Dar University, Zenzelima Campus registered for ''Communicative English Language
Skills II, course were participated as the comparison group (CG) and interventional
group (IG) respectively. While the CG participants were taught the course using the
conventional CLT approach, the IG participants were taught the same course using PI
incorporated into the conventional CLT approach along with pragmatic awareness and
pragmatic competence metalanguage and metapragmatic description tasks and
activities. The collected pretest and posttest data were analysed using the independent
samples and paired sample t-test statistical analysis of the SPSS (Version25)
statistical package. The quantitative data analysis results from the IG participants was
found statistically significant in comparison to the CG participants with p - value, p <
0.001, which is statistically significant with more than 99% probability of confidence
and less than 1% probability of error or confidence interval. In addition to this, the
effect size of the analysis from IG participants was reported as d = 0.80. Similarly, the
result from the qualitative data also revealed the positive effects of PI on learners’
communicative competence. Both results of the statistical and qualitative analysis
signify the IG participants taught using PI integrated CLT approach outperformed
their CG counterparts in their communicative competence ability after the
intervention. This implies that the incorporated PI metalanguage and metapragmatic
description activities into the FLEn1012 freshman course has significant positive
effects in enhancing learners' communicative competence. Therefore, it can be
concluded that incorporating PI into the CLT approach and teaching materials in EFL
has positive effects on learners' communicative competence