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Most of the studies in Interlanguage Pragmatics have focused on the performance and acquisition of speech acts by nonnative speakers, considering politeness only as a subsidiary issue. The present study pertains to linguistic politeness and attempts to investigate the effects of different teaching methods on the acquisition of English politeness strategies (PSs). Eight groups of freshman and junior English majors were randomly assigned to three experimental groups (enhanced input, explicit teaching, and role play) and one control group (mere exposure). The participants took a TOEFL test, a pretest, and finally a posttest after a seven-week treatment of a list of PSs. The results indicated that instruction has a significant positive influence on the acquisition of PSs and explicit teaching is significantly the most effective method. Role play and input enhancement were the second and third most effective. Moreover, it was shown that although the level of language proficiency significantly influenced the knowledge of PSs (the ability to recognize appropriate PSs for each social context), it did not affect the acquisition of PSs. The findings imply that the instruction of PSs can be started at intermediate level and explicit teaching alongside role play activities will greatly benefit language learners.

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Despite the general findings that address the positive contribution of teaching pragmatic features to interlanguage pragmatic development, the question as to the most effective method is far from being resolved. Moreover, the potential of literature as a means of introducing learners into the social practices and norms of the target culture, which underlie the pragmatic competence, has not been fully explored. This study, then, set out to investigate the possible contribution of plays, as a medium of instruction, to the pragmatic development through either explicit or implicit mode of instruction. To this end, 80 English-major university students were assigned to four experimental groups: two literary and two nonliterary groups. One of the literary groups (Implicit Play) received typographically enhanced plays containing the speech acts of apology, request, and refusal and the other (Explicit Play) received the same treatment in addition to the metapragmatic instruction on the acts. The medium of instruction for the nonliterary groups were dialogs containing the given functions; they were also given either enhanced input (Implicit Dialog) or input plus metapragmatic information (Explicit Dialog). Analyses of the four groups’ performance on a Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) before and after the treatment did not show any advantage for the literary medium, i.e., there was no significant difference between literary and nonliterary groups. It was rather the mode of instruction that mattered most, where explicit groups outperformed their implicit counterparts. These findings indicate that even though implicit teaching, that is, exposure to enhanced input followed by some awareness-raising tasks, is effective in pragmatic development, it cannot contribute so much to learning as can the explicit instruction.