Teaching Strategies to Get the Tone Right: Making Requests and Gaining Compliance

Abstract

Language learners invariably struggle with the target language pragmatics, and helping them to understand and use it appropriately is not an easy task for ESL teachers. Specific pragmatic acts, such as requests, involve myriad elements that, despite being inherent to these acts, are quite elusive. No wonder so many ESL teachers feel intimidated and, not surprisingly, end up avoiding dealing with pragmatics in the classroom. This article introduces a strategy-instruction tech- nique that has been proven effective in teaching language learners how to make requests and gain compliance.