Used three principal databases

Introduction

In order to compile the literature review for the present study, the researcher used three principal databases: Summon Cardiff Met University database, the American University in Cairo database, and Google Scholar. The search terms used were: ‘instruction in pragmatics’; ‘teaching pragmatics’; ‘pragmatic competence’; ‘second language acquisition’; ‘foreign language context’; ‘pragmatics and instruction’; ‘interlanguage pragmatics’; ‘requests’; and ‘attitude towards instruction in pragmatics’. Sources were chosen based on four criteria, their appropriateness, relevance, recency, and whether they contain reference material written by authorities in researching the fields of SLA, pragmatics, and instruction in pragmatics.
The literature review is broken down into three sections. The first section offers a brief introduction to this chapter. The second section provides theoretical overview of pragmatics, its significance in SLA, the theoretical frameworks related to teaching pragmatics, the underpinnings of teaching pragmatic competence, as well as a review of the principal pedagogical techniques, while reviewing the importance of instruction in pragmatics. A survey of the current views on ‘speech act theory’ and ‘politeness theory’ will be offered with special focus on request and its strategies as a speech act in which politeness particularly negative politeness is underlined. Finally, the third section introduces a review of the literature on pragmatics and ILP research, an overview of ILP developmental studies that explore L2 learners’ perception and production of requests as well as the learners’ attitude towards TL experience. This chapter offers a review of

the literature of request research in EFL contexts, with little attention to ESL context. The review would have restricted itself to requests and interventional studies only. However, there are very few cross-cultural and longitudinal studies that examine L2 learners’ pragmatic development; they will be reviewed briefly because they relate closely to our discussion. In this final section, some influential studies on the learners’ attitudes towards instruction in pragmatics will be reviewed.