Speech Acts in an Online Learning Environment: Developing EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Competence through the Discourse of Social Media : X Platform as a case Study
Speech Acts in an Online Learning Environment: Developing EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Competence through the Discourse of Social Media : X Platform as a case Study
أفعال الكلام في الصّفوف الدّراسيّة الالكترونيّة: تعزيز الكفاءة البراغماتيّة لمتعلّمي اللّغة الإنجليزيّة كلغة أجنبيّة من خلال خطاب وسائل التّواصل الاجتماعيّ منصة إكس كمثال
Dr. Fatima Adel Arar[1]
د. فاطمة عادل عرار
تاريخ الاستلام 12/ 2/ 2026 تاريخ القبول 29/ 3/2026
Abstract
This mixed-method study investigates the effect of authentic digital discourse in teaching English as foreign language (EFL) on the pragmatic competence development of high school (EFL) learners. Based on Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and Sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978). This study focused on both interpretative and productive speech acts. One group pretest-posttest design of 30 intermediate students of EFL from different high schools ran for six-weeks instruction via adapted social media texts from X platform (Twitter). Data were collected through pre and post-tests, discourse speaking tasks of role-play situations, and a questionnaire to investigate the attitude of the participants. The quantitative data indicated significantly gains in students’ pragmatic competence while the qualitative data of the survey proved more awareness of indirect speech acts and contextual meaning. Pedagogically, the results point to the significance of authentic digital discourse in EFL instruction.
Keywords: speech act, X, social media, discourse, pragmatic competence, digital classroom, EFL.
ملخص
تتناول هذه الدّراسة، التي اعتمدت على منهجية البحث المختلط، أثر دمج اللّغة الحقيقيّة (اللّغة المستخدمة اليوميّة) في تدريس اللّغة الإنجليزيّة كلغة أجنبيّة، وعلى تنمية الكفاءة البراغماتيّة لدى طلاب المرحلة الثّانويّة. وانطلاقًا من نظرية أفعال الكلام (أوستن، 1962؛ سيرل، 1969) والنظرية الاجتماعيّة الثّقافيّة (فيجوتسكي، 1978)، تستكشف الدّراسة تفسير أفعال الكلام وإنتاجها. وقد شارك في الدّراسة ثلاثون طالبًا من طلاب المستوى المتوسط في اللّغة الإنجليزيّة من مدارس ثانوية مختلفة، وذلك ضمن تصميم تجريبي يعتمد على اختبار قبليّ وبعديّ، حيث خضعوا لتدخل تعليميّ لمدّة ستة أسابيع باستخدام نصوص مُعدّلة من منصة التّواصل الاجتماعيّ إكس (تويتر). وتم جمع البيانات من خلال اختبارات قبليّة وبعديّة، ومهام التحدث في سياقات تمثيلية، واستبيان لقياس آراء المشاركين. وكشف التحليل الكمي عن تحسن ذي دلالة إحصائيّة في الكفاءة البراغماتيّة للطّلاب، بينما أشارت النتائج النوعية للاستبيان إلى تعزيز الوعي بأفعال الكلام غير المباشرة والمعنى السّياقيّ. تُبرز النتائج القيمة التربوية ل دمج اللّغة الحقيقية (اللّغة المستخدمة اليوميّة) في تدريس اللّغة الإنجليزيّة كلغة أجنبيّة، وتشير إلى أنّ دمج المواد القائمة على وسائل التّواصل الاجتماعيّ يُمكن أن يُحسّن بشكلٍ ملحوظ الكفاءة التّواصلية والوعي التّداوليّ لدى المتعلمين.
الكلمات المفتاحيّة: أفعال الكلام، إكس، وسائل التّواصل الاجتماعيّ، الخطاب، الكفاءة التّداوليّة، دمج اللّغة الحقيقيّة، اللّغة الإنجليزيّة كلغة أجنبيّة
Introduction
The discussion on online dialogue is another chance created by the use of technology to enrich every aspect of life. As it stands, social medias are real places for people to show their speech acts like asking, apologizing, complaining and expressing opinion and so on (Crystal, 2011). This sort of cyberspace interaction will be totally helpful for English as foreign language learners because they could observe the real language exchanges exist outside the textbooks. Even if learners learn English grammar perfectly, they may fail to acquire pragmatics competence, the knowledge of about how to interpret implicatures and indirect speech acts (Kasper&Rose, 2002). The goal of this research is to reveal if teaching digital discourses will enhance the pragmatic competence of the learners.
Theoretical Background
This Speech Act Theory was selected as the theoretical framework since it provides learners with a view of language as action (Austin, 1962, Searle,1969). That is to say, utterances can perform actions by making statements, requests, questions, commands, aswell as expressions of feelings etc. Furthermore, this study is also built on sociocultural approach (Vygotsky, 1978), which primarily describes the importance of interaction and mediation for learning. In this context, social media sessions are the best possible places for authentic interactions, through which learners are participating in real life situations, and have an opportunity for their own knowledge construction. Furthermore, Hymes (1972) describes the importance of appropriateness of speech in context in making pragmatics an integral part of language learning.
Significance of the study
This research contributes to the field of applied linguistics and language pedagogy by providing a clear outline of how Speech Act Theory may be used for analyzing real-life online discourse in classroom settings, and provides pedagogical information for teachers seeking to include modern communication practices into the language classroom.
The current study provides insight into the development of pragmatic competence. By using the writings of students’ rather than the researchers’, the study demonstrates how authentic input can contribute to pragmatic growth. The study suggests that teachers can enhance digital literacy and pragmatics while helping students comprehend actual scenarios.
Research Problem
EFL students are good at grammatical rules, their usage, and their form, but they do struggle to understand other English native conversations (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Schmidt, 2010). Students main systematic learning method is based on the use of examples from books; so, authentic conversations such as indirect request strategies, humor, sarcastic utterance and implicatures are much difficult to be comprehended (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Schmidt, 2010).
Conversely, social media discourses offer many examples of natural speech acts that resemble real use of language (Baron, 2008). However, most of the research conducted has not reported the use of these materials during class to enable EFL high school learners to develop pragmatics competence (Bardovi-Harlig, 2013).
Research questions
Emerging from the aforementioned research problem, three research questions are formulated:
RQ1: Will the integration of authentic digital discourse from X improve the pragmatic competence of EFL high school learners?
RQ2: How does exposure to social media-based discourse from X platform affect EFL high school learners’ ability to speak using different types of speech acts (requests, apologies, refusals)?
RQ3: How do EFL high school students perceive the use of authentic digital discourse in developing their communicative competence.
Hypotheses:
Trying to answer the research questions of the current research, three hypotheses are formulated:
H1: there is a statistically significant difference between pre-test and post-test scores in EFL learners’ pragmatic competence after being exposed to authentic digital discourse from X.
H2: EFL learners will demonstrate significantly improved performance in speaking of appropriate speech acts (requests, apologies, refusals) in the post-test compared to the pre-test.
H3: EFL learners will demonstrate positive attitude towards the intervention of authentic digital discourse from X in developing communicative competence.
Literature Review
After Austin (1962) proposed that utterances are acts, Speech Acts Theory have been dominating in pragmatic research; Austin distinguished the acts as locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. Subsequently, Searle (1969) further improved the theory and categorized speech acts into five major groups: assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declaratives.
On the other hand, in the current period, more online communication has led to a newer form of interaction and communication. Crystal (2011) considers online language as a mixture of spoken and written forms. Tagg (2015) states that social media texts frequently rely on shared assumptions and background knowledge, as well as cultural categories. Such features make digital discourse ideal for teaching pragmatic meaning. Authentic examples help students see how communicative intentions are realized in real life.
The significance of pragmatic competence has been a widely acknowledged focus in EFL researches. According to Kasper and Rose (2002), learners need to have the ability to recognize the communicative intentions in sociocultural context. In previous interlanguage pragmatics studies, learners’ pragmatic competence has been consistently observed to make extensive progress following exposure to authentic target language input, as well as explicit instruction (Kasper & Rose 2002, Barron 2003, Taguchi & Li 2014). Learners not only made progress in pragmatic and sociocultural competencies, but they also became more proficient at producing contextually appropriate speech acts (requests, apologies and refusals) (Barron, 2003; Taguchi & Li, 2014). Moreover, results from role-play and speaking task studies have shown that learners could make significant advancement in their ability to produce contextually appropriate speech acts in the process of interaction, accompanied by greater generation of politeness strategies and indirectness (Taguchi, 2006; Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1993). These findings support the expectation that instruction under authentic discourse can lead to measurable gains in pragmatic competence and oral performance.
Related studies
Some recent studies (Sykes 2018; Gonzalez- Lloret 2020) show that digital environments reinforce, through the increased engagement and pragmatic awareness, the traditional speech acts performed by the learner. Jegede (2024) examines how the main speech acts are performed in three main social media platforms, Facebook, and Twitter (these days called X), and Instagram (considering the public posts versus the private messaging). This work aims to identify the types, frequencies, and pragmatic strategies of speech acts performed in the three social media platforms, namely requests, apologies, and compliments. The research applied a mixed-method corpus based study on a dataset of three million social media posts, and shows how communication in the three different contexts of interaction differs, in that, the public posts were shown to be less direct, more image-based, and less personal; whereas private messages were somewhat the opposite. This research exemplifies the ways through which digital environments influence speech acts practices via audience awareness and platform features, such as multimodal elements like emojis and hashtags. Therefore, the present study will use only one platform, X (formerly Twitter), which was one of Jegede’s (2024) corpus-based approaches, through which he studied the utilization of speech acts. As Jegede’ study pointed out the utilization of requests, apologies and compliments in this platform, the present study will take the advantage of this result to utilize the English native language posts from X platform as the new intervention to be studied in high school EFL classes. Moreover, elaboration in utilizing appropriate speech acts in speaking will also be the focus of this study because of Kholodniak’s (2026) research that investigates how digital platforms support the development of students’ communicative competence, implying that digital platforms have a positive impact on improving students’ oral speech.
Methodology
Research Design
In this study, a mixed-method research design was adopted using a one-group pretest-posttest in which qualitative and quantitative techniques were employed: the quantitative aspect aimed to examine the shifts in students’ comprehension and performance on speech acts by pretest and posttest, while the qualitative aspect was to explore students’ attitude toward the instructional intervention.
This design was employed in order to triangulate findings and so to ensure statistical validity and fully rich interpretive analysis of the EFL learners pragmatics enhancement.
Participants
The experimental group one consisted of 30 intermediate EFL students aged between 16 and 18, studying at a high school. Their level was determined based on the institutional placement test criteria similar to the CEFR levels (B1- B2).
Participants data were gathered through using a convenience sampling, which was applied here because of the easy and quick access of the participants to the researcher. The participants were characterized by having the same native language which was Arabic, and by the experience of learning English as a foreign language.
This experiment was conducted at an English teaching instruction center up to CEFR criterion, B1-B2/Intermediate, where high school learners of EFL classes were enrolled into this level. The instructional intervention of implementing authentic discourse from social media of X was into EFL classes lasted for six weeks.
Data Collection Instruments
- Pragmatic Competence Test (Pre-test and Post-test)
A test developed by a researcher was administered to evaluate the students’ pragmatic ability pre and post intervention. The research utilized a Written Discourse Completion Test adapted from the pragmatic assessment framework proposed by Fa (2012). The instrument consisted of ten situational prompts which could elicit requests, apologies and refusals across various social settings. Two equivalent versions, pre-test and post-test (see Appendices A and B), were produced in order to guarantee equivalence and reduce a practice effect. The test contained written situational judgment tasks.
The pragmatic competence pre-post tests were scored following Taguchi (2015) and Brdovi-Harlig (2013) rubric. Five points were awarded if the utterance was completely appropriate and native-like, four for acceptable, three for acceptable but limited competence, two for inappropriate, and one for wrong answers.
2- Speaking task,
During the speaking assessment/interaction, students are asked to have some interaction in relation to the given themes. Participants in the current study were asked to produce spoken responses to contextualized tasks, which were adapted from real postings and interactions found on X. A speaking test with three role-play tasks was designed to diagnose the students’ ability to use speech acts, such as requests, apologies and refusals, correctly in their conversations. The tasks were designed according to the theoretical framework of interlanguage pragmatics (Bardovi-Harlig, 2013) and a framework of pragmatic assessment (Taguchi, 2015). Two equivalent tasks, a pre-test and post-test (see Appendix C and D) were administered and the students’ responses were evaluated according to an analytic rating scale of pragmatic appropriateness, use of politeness strategies, linguistic realization and fluency.
3- Attitude questionnaire
To test the H3 hypothesis, an open-ended questionnaire is carried out to explore students’ attitudes concerning the use of authentic digital discourse from X in improving learners’ communicative competence. There are 11 question items (Appendix E) in the questionnaire in order to draw information about learners’ attitudes, experiences, and reflection about their pragmatic development, engagement, and motivation. Thematic analysis is made and found the pattern and attitude that occurred in the responses.
Instructional Intervention
The intervention took place over a period of six weeks with two sessions per week. Instructions were based on authentic and English native digital discourse demonstrated through the authentic discourse teacher elicited from X. The first procedure was the pragmatic competence pre-test followed directly by the speaking pre-test. The pre-tests were followed by the instructional intervention which includes three stages. The first stage was the exposure (one) through analysis of authentic posts with speech acts introduced by means of a focus on the language used and their contexts. The second stage was guided analysis that is dedicated to the identification of speech act types of refusals, apologies and requests. During this stage, a discussion of speech act types’ appropriateness took place. This stage was followed by the practice (one), through practice exercises of rewriting new posts (tweets) with own language or matching responses. The last stage in the instructional intervention was the production one where learners wrote their own responses to authentic posts and wrote own simulations to those posts, including refusals, apologies, and requests. The last step was role-playing authentic posts with responses to them.
After the instruction, the post-tests of pragmatic competence and speaking were administered. An open-ended questionnaire was carried out to investigate the participants’ attitude towards the instruction.
Results
1- Pragmatic Competence Test Results
To examine H1, the researcher employed a paired-samples t-test to analyze quantitative data reflected the pre-test and post-test scores and find out the influence of the social media instructions, namely X, on students’ pragmatic competence. It revealed that the difference between pre-test score (M=62.30, S D=7.12) and post-test score (M=78.60, S D=6.45) was significant (see table 1).
Table 1: Mean Score of Pragmatic Competence Pre-Post-Test’s Results
| Variable | N | Mean | Std. Deviation |
| Pre-test | 30 | 63.47 | 4.67 |
| Post-test | 30 | 80.63 | 4 |
In order to establish whether the improvement in the post-test result was significant or not a two tailed test was used, t (29) =-12.84, p<.001. which found the change to be significant as shown in table 2.
Table 2: Paired Samples t-Test of Pragmatic Competence Tests
| Pair t-test | Mean Difference | T | df | Sig. (2-tailed) |
| Pre–Post | -17.17 | -13.52 | 29 | < .001 |
Due to employing a one-group pretest-posttest design which could not have a control group and t-test which proved the significant of the result, the Cohen’s d test would be necessary to tell how big or how meaningful a difference was. The effect size like Cohen‘s d was 2.34, showing that the results had very large effect size as table 3 showed.
Table 3: Effect Size for the Pragmatic Competence Improvement
| Comparison | Cohen’s d | Interpretation |
| Pre–Post | 2.40 | Very Large |
A very large effect size (Cohen‘s d= 2.40) was observed which reflected a significant gain in pragmatic competence of the learners from the employment of authentic social media in the process of consolidating the correct use of speech act‘s apology, request and refusal. Therefore, the H 1 is accepted based on the above findings.
2- Speaking Pre-Post Test’s Results
Speaking samples were evaluated using a researcher-designed analytic rubric. The researcher-designed rubric (Appendix F) incorporated the results of features included in other existing analytic rating scales for interlanguage pragmatics and speaking (Taguchi, 2015; Bardovi-Harlig, 2013) including politeness strategies, linguistic realization, and fluency. What it shows, when comparing the mean score of the speaking pre and post-test, is improvement, as table 4 shows.
Table 4: Mean Score of Speaking Pre-Post-Test’s Results
| Test | N | Mean (M) | Std. Deviation (SD) |
| Pre-test | 30 | 58.40 | 6.85 |
| Post-test | 30 | 76.90 |
6.10 |
In order to find out whether this improvement in the post-test results was significant or not a two-tailed test was used and as table 5 shows, the p value was p <.001.
Table 5: Paired Sample t-Test for Speaking Performance
| Variable Pair | Mean Difference | T | df | Sig. (p) |
| Pre vs Post | -18.50 | -14.72 | 29 | < .001 |
While the result shows a large improvement, it was advised to perform a Cohen’s d test to test whether the effect size was large or not, since there was no control group participants in the current study. This Cohen’s d shows a value of 2.69, (table 6) which indicates a very large effect.
Table 6: Effect Size for Speaking Improvement
| Comparison | Cohen’s d | Interpretation |
| Pre vs Post | 2.69 | Very Large |
The following results observed in tables 4, 5 and 6 imply that the intervention of X platform was effective in helping the participants perform the speech acts of apology, request and refusal in a more appropriate way during their spoken performance. Therefore, the H2 is confirmed with regard to these results.
Qualitative Analysis
The open-ended responses were thematically coded to identify common perceptions and attitudes in order to test H3. The qualitative data drawn from the open-ended questionnaire were analyzed thematically. Students’ responses were grouped and synthesized into thematic patterns to represent their perceptions on authentic learning. Three main themes emerged from the analysis: (1) positive perception of the authentic learning, (2) higher communicative competence, and (3) increased confidence.
1- Positive Perceptions of Authentic Learning
Key positive idea emerging from the learners’ responses was: a positive attitude toward the use of authentic digital discourse. The majority of students stated that learning from authentic language examples from X was more beneficial and enjoyable than learning from other methods like books. Participants often ascribed the experience as: “real”, “useful in everyday life”, “nearer to natural speech” One participant even commented: “I enjoy hearing how people normally speak, not mechanical or bookish sentences.” These comments prove that authenticity was a significant factor in learners’ enjoyment.
2- Enhanced Communicative Competence
Many students claimed a significant increase in the ability to communicate with politeness. This was among the most important areas, as well as more effective speaking in general. Some learners explained: acquiring greater speaking proficiency, improving sense of interactional context (teacher, friend) and ability to select the appropriate expressions. Such as: ‘Before, I spoke directly, now I know how to be polite.’ Another student detailed: ‘I learned to apologize in many ways according to the situations.”
These findings demonstrate that the intervention helped improve the pragmatic awareness and communicative competence of the learners; thus, these provide support for the third hypothesis raised in this study.
3- Confidence building
Confidence in speaking English emerged as an important theme to do with how the learners’ confidence increased. The learners reported they were: more confident and comfortable speaking English, less worried about making errors, and more confident using “polite phrases” for example “I now feel more confident when I speak for I know what to say”.
Demonstrates that providing authentic models and practice opportunities in language tasks diminished anxiety and boosted communicative self-efficacy.
Qualitative Results Summary
Overall, the qualitative results show that the learners had very positive attitudes toward the use of authentic digital discourse in learning English. The qualitative evidence confirms that the intervention had positive impacts on increasing the learners’ skills of communicating and using language pragmatically, encouraging their interest, motivation, and confidence to use language. Thus, the qualitative results can be seen as qualitative support for the hypothesis that learners regard authentic digital discourse as a useful tool to develop their communicative competence.
Therefore, the qualitative findings overwhelmingly support the third hypothesis by showing that students develop positive attitudes towards using X authentic digital discourse as an effective means of enhancing their foreign language communicative competence.
Ethical Considerations
Consistent with Creswell (2014) instructions when conducting case studies, participants were told that the study would be explained to them and that information about the study would be voluntary. The researchers sought to explain to the participants that the participation in the study will have no consequences over their results and their academic performance would not be affected. This has included confidentiality and anonymity.
Discussion
The current study explored a pedagogical intervention based on Speech Act Theory to improving EFL learners’ pragmatic competence, specifically in the production and comprehension of requests, apologies and refusals. Given the boom in digital communication, authentic discourse from the X platform was used to examine this approach. This is consistent with other studies that have highlighted the role of exposure to authentic input in the development of pragmatic competence (Crystal 2011; Kasper & Rose 2002).
The current study results showed a considerable increase in learners’ pragmatic competence, demonstrated in the use and interpretation of speech acts in context successfully. Such performance improvements could be caused by the increased sensitivity to reality of the actual speech act implementation in the native speakers ‘digital discourses in various social contexts. The results indicate that digital discourse carries not only pragmatic information but also the competence to use such information.
The current study participants also had a positive attitude toward the use of authentic digital platform such as language learning tools. A good attitude toward learning is an important factor for language learning processes. Learners’ use of X interacted with this positive attitude and possibly resulted in more motivated learning higher progress obtained. Learners’ use of X enabled them to access authentic language use.
The present study results are in agreement with the findings of Jegede (2008). Jegede, as already mentioned, explored the nature of speech acts used across digital media and identified the flexible properties of online discourse. However, Jegede‘s study is not a replication of the present one, as it solely explored the application of speech act use in digital contexts, whereas this one explores the pedagogical use of digital discourse to improve students’ pragmatic competence.
In addition, the idea behind working with one platform X was to reduce the potential variation among the different digital environments, enabling more specific analysis of the support of pragmatic growth by the discourse features of one platform.
Limitations
In spite of these positive results, some limitations should not be neglected. Firstly, the sample size (N=30) was relatively small, which restricts the extent to which the results can be generalized to larger populations of EFL learners. Secondly, the six-week intervention may have been too short to observe the formation and preservation of pragmatic competence in naturalistic conditions over time. Thirdly, role-play speaking tasks and Discourse Completion Tests were employed, as standard practice in interlanguage pragmatics studies, but these may not accurately reflect foreign language use in genuine contexts of interaction. Furthermore, the use of a single digital platform, X, limits the ability to relate these findings to other formats of digital text or talk that contain markedly different interactional and communicative patterns. Additionally, inter-rater reliability indices indicate some degree of subjectivity in the assessment of speaking performance, which may have influenced the results.
Conclusion
In this study, the effects of digital discourse from X on pragmatic competence was examined through an investigation into production of speech acts (i.e., requests, apologies, refusals) by an experimental group of EFL students. Participants showed a significant increase in pragmatic skill development in both the posttests and speaking tasks. This indicates that digital discourse can support learners’ appropriate language use in-context. Students demonstrated favorable attitudes, specifically, they thought that using digital discourse to address pragmatic learning issues in class enhanced their attention, motivation, and speaking confidence. These findings have pedagogical implications for integrating authentic digital input into this type of learning experience since it provides learners with a means to connect classroom language learning to real-life contexts. Overall, the current study adds to the growing body of research related to language pragmatics and demonstrates that technology-based discourse-oriented instruction can be a useful approach to help EFL learners hone their communicative competence.
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Appendices
Appendix A
1- You’re talking to a classmate, and you want them to send you the assignment because you were tired and did not do it and have no time to finish it. What would you say?
2- You didn’t go to class. You ask a classmate to explain the lesson. What do you think?
- You want your teacher to let you take the test again because you were sick and did not study well for the exam. What would you say?
- You forgot your close friend’s birthday. What would you say?
- You were talking loudly in class and interrupted the teacher. What would you say?
- You stepped on someone’s foot by mistake. What would you say?
- Your friend wants to go for a walk with you, but you’re too tired. How would you respond?
- Your teacher wants you to join an extra activity, but you can’t. What would you say?
- A classmate wants to copy your homework. What would you say?
- A stranger asks to use your phone. What would you say?
Appendix B
1- During class, you ask your friend to lend you a pen. What would you say?
- You ask a classmate you don’t know very well to send you their project file. What would you say?
3- You ask your teacher for extra time to finish your work. What would you say?
- You get to meet your friend late. What would you say?
5- You didn’t do your homework. What would you tell your teacher?
6- You push someone in line by mistake. What would you say?
- Your friend needs help, but you have a test tomorrow. What would you say?
8- You have to present your project today, but you are not ready yet. How would you tell your teacher?
9- Your classmate asked you to copy your answers for an assignment that took you a whole day to finish and you refused? How would you respond?
10- Someone asked you to borrow money, but you don’t trust them. How would you respond?
Appendix C
You will take part in brief role-playing scenarios. Talk normally, be nice, and appropriate but clear on what you need.
Scenario: You were unable to attend class in an important week. You wish your teacher could repeat the lesson, just once more after class.
Scenario: You borrowed your friends’ notes, but accidentally lose it!
Role-play: Apologize to your friend.
Scenario: Your classmate wants to cheat during the exam by sending him/her a small piece of paper to your homework but you refused.
Role-play: Refuse politely.
Appendix D
You will take part in brief role-playing scenarios. Talk normally, be nice, and appropriate but clear on what you need.
Task 1: request
Scenario: You need more time to turn in your work. Talk to your teacher about getting more time.
Task 2: apology
Scenario: You forgot to meet your friend at the right time.
Task 3: refusal
Scenario: A classmate asks you to help them cheating during a test.
Appendix E
Answer the following questions in details as much as possible. There are no right or wrong answers. Your answers will be utilized for research purposes only.
Q1. Overall, how would you describe your experience learning English through true posts from X platform?
Q2. Describe one thing about using authentic digital content in your English lessons that you liked?
Q3. What are the challenges or difficulties that you faced while learning using posts from X platform?
Q4: Do you think that using real digital discourse helped you to improve your speaking and writing in English? How?
Q5. How did the activities based on X platform change the way you spoke or wrote?
Q6. What is one new thing you learned about how to speak and write English correctly?
Q7: How did the posts from X help you saying “please,” “sorry,” or “no” in English?
Q8. Do you feel yourself more confident of using polite and appropriate language in different situations after being exposed to authentic posts from X? Why or why not?
Q9. Do you think learning form X platform as a digital discourse is better than learning from books? Why?
Q10. Do you want to keep learning English on real digital platforms? Why or why not?
Optional question:
Q11. Is there anything else you want to say about how this learning method worked for you?
Appendix F
Pre-Post Speaking performance test rubric
Adapted from pragmatic assessment research (Taguchi ,2015; Bardovi-Harlig, 2013)
| Criterion | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Pragmatic Appropriateness | Fully appropriate to context | Mostly appropriate | Some issues | Often inappropriate | Completely inappropriate |
| Politeness Strategy | Excellent use (hedging, softeners) | Good | Limited | Weak | None |
| Linguistic Realization | Natural, fluent | Minor errors | Understandable | Frequent errors | Breakdown |
| Speech Act Strategy | Clear, well-structured | Adequate | Basic | Unclear | Incorrect |
| Fluency & Interaction | Smooth, confident | Minor hesitation | Some pauses | Hesitant | Very limited |
[1] PhD in Linguistics/ Lebanese University
