The growing perceived importance of pragmatic competence has led to increased research attention on interlanguage pragmatics, which focuses on examining learners’ development of pragmatic competence when acquiring a second language. Among the various factors that influence the development of pragmatic competence, the efficacies of inductive vs. deductive approaches to pragmatic instruction have received some research attention. Empirical studies have been conducted to compare the effectiveness of these two approaches, but their research findings have been contradictory and inconclusive. This study further examines the effectiveness of explicit deductive instruction (EDI) and explicit inductive instruction (EII) on learners’ development of pragmatic competence in the teaching of Chinese as a second language (CSL), using the speech act of request as the target pragmatic feature.

 This study adopts an experimental research design with the following structure: pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest. The participants will be about 50 learners from two lower-intermediate-level CSL classes of one university of mainland China. The two classes will be taught the same request-making patterns and rules by the same teacher, but in two different ways. Learners in EDI class will be presented with the explicit explanation of request-making rules before studying examples. In contrast, learners in EII class will analyze examples to discover the rules first before the explicit rules are provided finally. The instructional treatment will be undertaken from April to May, 2018. Data will be collected by both a multiple-choice judgement task and a 10-situation oral Discourse Completion Task (DCT). Learners’ development of L2 Chinese request will be compared between the two treatment conditions.

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Key words: deductive instruction, inductive instruction, L2 Chinese, request