| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 97 === EFL learners in Taiwan are hardly taught language functions in high schools since most of the English courses are designed in accordance with the examination-oriented goal, which is far more focused on teaching language form than on teaching language use. The purpose of the present study is to investigate whether indirectness and politeness would influence appropriate linguistic choice for invitation, and to investigate the effectiveness of teaching language functions to high school students in EFL classrooms.
In this study, 20 American subjects’ ratings of eight linguistic forms for invitation by indirectness and politeness were analyzed to obtain the American norm, based on which a four-unit program of teaching language functions was designed. 138 senior high school students from two senior high schools in northern Taiwan took a pre-test before receiving the instruction and a post-test afterwards. Two classes from each school received function-based teaching method and structure-based teaching method respectively.
The results of the pre-test and the post-test, in comparison with the American norm, indicate that teaching language functions is effective in improving Chinese students’ competence of the functional aspect of English. Next, the test results verify that the appropriate choice of linguistic forms is indeed influenced by politeness and indirectness, although these two functional factors are not in a systematic relationship. Moreover, Modality strategy is found to be more difficult and more complex than Direct strategy and Hinting strategy. In addition, although the students from the school of high BCT scores tend to perform better than those from the school of low BCT scores, students of both schools made significant improvement in learning the concepts of indirectness and politeness. The findings given above imply that teaching language functions to high school students in EFL classrooms is feasible, necessary, and effective.
In addition, according to the results of the general evaluations to this teaching program offered by the students and the English teachers involved, although the Taiwanese students showed preference to structure-based method, function-based method is verified to be more effective. In conclusion, the students’ and the teachers’ evaluations of this program indicate that learning language functions may not be interesting, but it is helpful and important to the students.
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