Abstract:
This action research observes a second year Japanese class at a university where
foreign language courses are elective for undergraduate students. In this study, using the
six strategies to teach Japanese speech acts that Ishihara and Cohen (2006) suggested, I
conducted three classes and analyzed my teaching practice with a critical friend. These
strategies assist learners toward the development of their understanding of the following
Japanese speech acts and also keep the learners to use them in a manner appropriate to
the context: (I) invitation and refusal; (2) compliments; and (3) asking for a permission.
The aim of this research is not only to improve my instruction in relation to second
language (L2) pragmatic development, but also to raise further questions and to develop
future research. The findings are analyzed and the data derived from my journals,
artifacts, students' work, observation sheets, interviews with my critical friend, and
pretests and posttests are coded and presented. The analysis shows that (I) after my
critical friend encouraged my study and my students gave me some positive comments
after each lesson, I gained confidence in teaching the suggested speech acts; (2) teaching
involved explaining concepts and strategies, creating the visual material (a video)
showing the strategies, and explaining the relationship between the strategy and
grammatical forms and samples of misusing the forms; (3) students' background and
learning styles influenced lessons; and (4) pretest and posttests showed that the students'
Icvel of their L2 appropriate pragmatics dramatically improved after each instruction.
However, after careful observation, it was noted that some factors prevented students
from producing the correct output even though they understood the speech act
differences.
