Research in the area of interlanguage pragmatics has mainly focused on speech acts such as thanking, apologising, complimenting, and some others. We learn languages to communicate in different situations, and it is very common that we have to take a certain stand. However, persuasion has not been considered in interlanguage pragmatics as a speech act. Drawing on the theoretical approach called Discourse-Historical Approach, the researcher suggests looking at persuasion as a complex speech act by extracting the most frequent language patterns, or strategies, and by teaching those to students. The study draws on political discourse, because defending a point of view and persuading others to agree with it is the main goal in this language domain.

The study investigated teachability of persuasion, and if teaching persuasive strategies has any influence on the degree of persuasiveness. 40 participants wrote a speech on an emotionally charged topic to persuade their audience to take their side. A pre- and post-test design was used with an intervention for the experimental group, during which the researcher employed consciousness-raising activities to emphasise how an argument may be enhanced with the help of certain linguistic features from political discourse strategies. Two coders blindly scored the speeches on the scale from 1 to 8 and gave comments on what linguistic features they found most persuasive. Although the coders were not consistent in their scoring, the results demonstrated that the experimental group made larger gains than the control group, and those gains were significant and marginally significant.

Authors:
Anna Viatova, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

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Posted by Clive Staples Lewis

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00

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