Pragmatic Development of Thai EFL Hospitality Undergraduates through YouTube Intervention Instruction: A Case of the Speech Act of Request at Hotel Front Desk Service
Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the development of strategies and pragma-linguistic competence in speech acts of request produced by Thai EFL Hospitality undergraduates (TEHU) in learning making polite requests of hotel front office service host-guest communication using YouTube intervention instruction. The participants were 30 third year hospitality students at Rajamangala University of Technology Srivijaya in Songkhla, Thailand. A set of request tutorial YouTube clips, receptionist and guest conversation clips and movies fragment clips together with students’ handout on pragmatics were the instructional materials used in this study. Seven and half hours of lessons on requests were conducted for a period of five weeks. The instruction followed the five stages of speech act teaching namely: Form search, Form comparison, Form analysis, Practice, and Discussion. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) concerning hotel front desk scenarios (Sirikhan, 2011) was adapted and used to collect the data. A quasi-experimental design (pretest –treatment - posttest) was used in the study. Descriptive statistics and t-test were used to compare pragmatic performance in requesting before and after treatment. The collected data were assessed by two raters using a pragmatic rating scale developed by Hudson, Detmer, and Brown (1995). The request strategies and pragma-linguistic students performed in the pretest and the posttest were analyzed based on the analytical framework of Taguchi (2006) and BlumKulka et al.’s (1989). The results of the study showed that the mean scores of the pretest and posttest were statistically significant at 0.05 level and bared better request performance on request strategies and pragma-linguistics after treatment indicating pragmatic development after YouTube Intervention Teaching Method (YITM) instruction.
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