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Sitting in the classroom for rather a long time, listening to the teacher and other students, and having occasional responses are what typically happen in the English teaching classrooms around the world. ETS, a big hall with at least three sites as language learning zones, brings about a dynamic method which environmentally simulates communicative occasions to provide the learners with an exciting and intensive practice on the current conversations through role-playing. In this study, the efficiency of ETS was evaluated in an experimental research design. To do so, 34 students of English Language and Literature at Semnan University were taken as subjects in two conversation classes. Upon the completion of the course for 10 sessions, a T-test was applied to see if the method makes any significant improvement. The result showed that ETS was significantly better than the traditional method. To see the students’ opinions about the method, a questionnaire was also conducted with the results revealing students’ positive feedback toward the method.  

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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.