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The aim of the upcoming research is to study aspects of the problem of implicit meaning that show that the language indexes this meaning to express it. Therefore, the issues that have been reviewed here should be considered, in the first place, as a means to develop sensitivity to the extraordinary subtleties of language to process this meaning that, in our hypothesis, can only be properly understood if we return to it its inherent dynamism and follow the path of its evolution for each utterance exclusively. After that, the obtained results gave us the opportunity to improve some of the past opinions and help advance the discussions in this field. Our reading of the topic and the results of the analyzes strengthened our belief that commenting on implied meaning, regardless of the process of its production, will be mixed with a kind of dogmatism, the abolition of which depends on acknowledging the role that has the explicit meaning in this, because in our opinion, the explicit and implicit meanings are not separate and independent from each other. So, during the discussion, we have tried to include in the analysis the variables that change from one utterance to another and from one context to another and may be ignored, so that we can remain relativistic despite our orientations that are manifested in a set of new definitions.The results of the analyzes indicated this fact that language condenses meaning ...

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Besides the main elements such as setting, theme, plot, and conflicts, any narrative or story requires another key element called character. It is the character that adds meaning and life to each of these elements, transforming a narrative into a compelling story. Characterization is essentially the process of bringing life and creating human figures from the elements of a narrative discourse. Creating and developing characters in the realm of storytelling and art is a delicate and novel task referred to as “characterization.” This process results in the creation of characters that are believable, engaging, and understandable for the audience. Characterization establishes a bridge of communication between the reader’s or viewer’s mind and the world of the story, enabling them to empathize with the characters, understand their emotions, and become curious about their actions and motivations, thereby increasing audience engagement.The corpus of this research consists of short stories by the Afghan author Mohammad Asef Soltanzadeh. The present study, relying on Soltanzadeh’s ability to utilize and develop story characters, is conducted in a descriptive-analytical manner. The aim has been to analyze the use of the element of characterization and the interaction between pragmatics and stylistics in three short stories from the collection “Nowruz is Only Splendid in Kabul,” considering Culpeper’s theoretical framework (2017). The results of this study indicate that characterization consistently follows three elements: the degree of narrative control, the dialectic of self and other, and explicit and implicit meanings within the overall narrative discourse, which the author skillfully employs.
 

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The present research study aimed to investigate the pragmatic awareness, attitudes, and practices of nine upper secondary English teachers in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms, with a focus on the intercultural aspects of the subject. Using a phenomenological methodology, the study conducted nine semi-structured interviews with English teachers of upper secondary students. Teachers demonstrated a high level of awareness of pragmatics, particularly when presented with pragmatic input based on syllabi formulations. The awareness suggested a recognition of the importance of pragmatic competence in language learning. Teachers incorporated pragmatics into their teaching methods. Pragmatics was used as a tool for fostering metacognitive conversations about language, helping students understand the appropriateness of certain phrases or words. Teachers aimed to make students aware of why people communicate in certain ways. The understanding of the reasons behind communication choices was deemed important for both teachers and students. Teachers perceived the intercultural dimensions of the English subject as crucial. Issues such as monocultural teaching groups, filter bubbles, and the rise of difficult conversations were highlighted. Teachers found using students' first languages to be an important tool for understanding and scaffolding their learning of English. The incorporation of pragmatics in the EFL classroom not only benefits language development but also serves as a facilitator in developing an understanding of other people. The study suggested a link between pragmatic awareness and intercultural competence in language teaching.

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Manُ s natural inclination towards rational detection of the surrounding realities, which has been manifested in the forms of oral and visual storytelling about his physical and intellectual experiences throughout history, was allegedly studied in a systematic way by Russian, in tandem with, Anglo- American formalists for the first time ever at the outset of the twentieth century. Then their intellectual legacies passed on to the francophone narratologists through the works of the Prague school structuralists and from the mid- twentiethe century on, were embodied under the rubric of Narratologie and fostered in a very broadr sense including modern literary narratives. However, reviewing certain binary, taxonomic, and typological concepts underlying the structural – narrotological outlook, in this article we have followed up the diverse genealogical lines of the "morphological narrative studies"- especially those based on the linguistically oriented theories- a little bit further beyond their very well acknowledged formalist ones, into the German tradition. We could not have started the venture, had we not drawn briefly on the most fundamental ideas put forward by such outstanding figures in the discipline as Barthes, Genette, Stanzel, Bremond, Ball, Chatman, Prince, Todorov, as well as many others. Finally, we have touched upon the recent developments brought about in the field of narrative studies, directly under the impact of cognitive linguistic pragmatics.

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Apology is an important social-pragmatic phenomenon in politeness field of study. This paper explores the apology strategies in Kurdish language by qualitative and quantitative methods. It sheds light on analyzing the data collected with the discourse completion task from 120 Kurdish subjects, supported by 24 interviews during 2016. The participants are divided by gender into 60 males and 60 females in the DCT data; 12 males vs 12 females. The results show use of similar apology strategies by both gender groups over situations, but with proportionally different frequencies, except in certain situations due to gender differences. In addition to gender as a striking social variable in Kurdish culture, the study also explores the significance of age and social status of subjects in conceptualizing apology acts. The study also displays the effect of the apology recipient’s social features on the subjects’ conceptualization and their obligation to apology. The clear significance of the apology supporting sub-strategies is also revealed in the study. The findings of the study are not consistent in many cases to those of other researchers, mainly western ones, with regard to the effect of gender and the use of responsibility strategy as an essential strategy other cultures. the study shows the collective features of the Kurdish culture which make them apologize differently, in certain situations, from other cultures. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the diversity of the apology strategies is based on the nature and severity of offence that can vary according to social norms prevailing in Kurdish culture.

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In Persian language, implicature has an important role in discourse and also inference by listener is of great importance. The purpose of this study is analysis of Persian data and categorizing different forms of implicature. The problem is how Persian speakers infer the intended message conveyed by the speaker. The study is based on a descriptive-analytical approach. Data of this study are the 50-hour recorded conversations of people in 13 situations in Tehran. After finding implicatures, they were classified. They were described and analyzed based on the hypotheses. It is concluded that in Persian, implicit meaning is shown by generalized conversational implicature, scalar implicature, particularized conversational implicature and conventional implicature. Moreover, grammatical structures including conditional sentences and wh.q structures can create implicit meaning with assuming special cases and resulting in impliatures. Finally we reached to the conclusion that the context of situation and culture are crucial and influential factors in analyzing the conversations. Since meaning and interpretation could be inferred in the context of situation.

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The aim of present study is to assess modularity of language. To this end, we measured the ability of children with specific language impairment in pragmatic and grammar and compaired them with normal children.  First we used narrative speech, language development and specific language impairment tests for diagnosis, then 6 children with specific language impairment were compared with 6 age-matched and 6 language-matched normal children in their grammar and pragmatics. Independent t-test, Man Whitney and Wilcox tests were used for analyzing data. It is shown that the children with SLI perform much lower their language-level with respect to grammatical properties (time agreement), but in pragmatic properties (reference) they don’t have meaningful differences. The result of this study shows that impairment in grammar beside good performance in pragmatic provides support for modularity of language.                        

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 Importing the pragmatic theories of ‘politeness’ (Brown and Levinson, 1987) and ‘impoliteness’ (Culpeper, 1996) into the domain of literary studies, this article intends to investigate politeness and impoliteness strategies used  in ten highly acknowledged Persian youngsters’ novels published from 2002 to 2012. For a novel to be included in the samples it should not be translation; most of its events should be narrated through dialogues; and that it should have won the majority of prizes for youngsters’ literature. This article addresses two central research questions: (1) How is the characters’ uses of politeness and impoliteness strategies in peer-group and non-peer-group vary? (2) In general, which strategies (politeness strategies or impoliteness strategies) are more frequently used by characters in Persian-speaking Youngsters’ Novels? The results, came by Chi-Square test, demonstrate that the characters in Persian youngsters’ novels are more inclined to using impolite strategies in peer-group interactions compared to non-peer-group interactions and that characters, in general, make more use of politeness strategies than impoliteness strategies.  

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Language is considered as the basic material in research on literature & mysticism. For the linguistics can enable researchers to achieve functional approaches. Although the presupposition was accounted in the past issue of the more basic subjects in domain of linguistics and newer approaches have shown little interest about this phenomenon by logical analysis, but reflect on some of these issues can assist in the analysis of invisible aspects of the meaning which was usually neglected in generative grammar. The research methodology is descriptive –analytic. It should consider the presuppositions as the specific kinds of conversational implicatures that, particularly, by means of the connectors of the discourse, such as conjunctions (but, so, in addition, etc) transfer the cognitive value of the propositions to the audience. This paper tries to respond to this question that how the presuppositions can figure the evolution of mystical principles in Sama' through its association with the requirements of ontological, epistemological and cultural context of the subject.

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The present paper benefit from an analytical descriptive research methodology conducted in field method with the purpose of examining linguistics competence and its pragmatic approaches application in forensic linguistics discourse in order to assess various persuasion techniques used by lawyers in penal courts of Iran to persuade judges. The data of the research gathered from20 open sessions of Shiraz city court rooms which contains 2112 sentences altogether which 654 sentences belonging to lawyers, 351 sentences to the judges, 987 to the accused and 120 sentences to the plaintiffs. In the present study .only the sentences used by the lawyers have been assessed in terms of verbal and non- verbal persuasion techniques analysis. Also the researcher has  been trying to answer the question :"How actors use verbal(syntax .semantics and pragmatics) and non-verbal methods  to achieve their goals and persuade each other .Findings of the study indicated that the lawyers employ verbal techniques such  as use of legal acts and pragmatics approaches  such as :exclusion ,inclusion ,nominalization , emphasis on  remorse, denial of  accused s offence and non-verbal methods in court room discourse in the realm of forensic linguistics.
 

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German language has a subject–verb–object (SVO) word order in independent clauses and a subject–object–verb (SOV) order in dependent clauses. Despite this feature, which is totally different from Farsi and English (these two languages both use the same word in dependent and independent clauses), German has a flexible word order. That is to say each of the syntactic functions (e.g. subject, direct object, indirect object, and adverb) can occur before the conjugated verb (referred to as Vorfeld), between the conjugated verb and the second verb (known as Mittelfeld, in sentences with a modal or linking verb), or after the second verb or the infinitive (called Nachfeld position in German grammar). The present study focuses on the arrangement of elements in the Mittelfeld position according to the information structure rules and other factors, such as definiteness, animacy, and pronoun placement. The significance of the study comes from the fact that there is no limitation on the places words can take in the middle of the sentence, as opposed to the Vorfeld position in which only one element can be placed. A question that is often raised here and that many German learners struggle to answer is: What are the rules underlying placement of elements in different positions? The answer to this question lies in that feature of the German language pointed to earlier in the abstract, i.e. the flexible word order in German. Referring to the rules of information structure and introducing other factors affecting word order in the middle of the sentence, the present paper (through a descriptive-analytical approach) shows that in addition to the relative freedom in the arrangement of grammatical words, semantic and pragmatic factors can also influence Words’ order. The results indicate that a number of these factors are sometimes in contradiction to one another. After scrutinizing a few example sentences, some decisive examples are presented.

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Conversational implicature, which is a component of speaker meaning that constitutes an aspect of what is meant in a speaker’s utterance without being part of what is said, is  subsumed under interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) which has attracted considerable attention from pragmatics practitioners and theoreticians. Nonetheless, very few studies have explored the correlation between implicature knowledge and the proficiency level; therefore, the present study, conducted at Golestan University among Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and English Literature students,  aimed to find out not only whether there would be any statistically significant relationship between 102 (35 males and 76 females) Iranian EFL learners’ proficiency level (High vs. Low) and their implicature knowledge as well as the subcategories of idiosyncratic and formulaic implicatures, but also whether there would exist any significant relationship between male and female EFL learners’ proficiency level (High vs. low) and their implicature knowledge. Moreover, this study investigated to what extent the (sub)categories of idiosyncratic and formulaic implicatures could be predicted by the proficiency level. The results of Pearson correlation indicated that there was a positive significant relationship between proficiency score and both formulaic implicatures and idiosyncratic implicatures. Moreover, among three sub-constructs of formulaic implicatures, Understand Criticism had the highest positive significant correlation and the Pope Q had the lowest correlation with proficiency. In addition, among four sub-constructs of idiosyncratic implicatures, Relevance Disclosure had the highest positive significant correlation and Relevance General had the lowest correlation with proficiency. However, the results of independent-samples t-test indicated that there is no significant difference in the implicature knowledge between male and female students. Results of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) revealed that both types of implicatures are predicted positively and significantly by proficiency level. Therefore, one of the implications of the present study for materials developers is to include idiosyncratic and formulaic implicatures in the textbooks to enhance the leaners’ implicature comprehension; teachers can also focus on the significance of interpreting the implied meaning rather than just focusing on linguistic features.
 

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Abstract
In the field of Persian contemporary fiction, there are novels with realistic context in which some of the elements are unrealistic. The structural feature of these novels distinguishes them from other types of novels. These features include "double layered meaning", "floating between reality and unreality", "fitting with political and historical situations". These features are so much so these novels could be classified as a subgenre of the Persian fiction. The question of this study is analyzing the common element of "double layering". So, the Pragmatics has been used, because it has been Practical for a better understanding of these novels. Political-historical event effect has been said in creation of this work with analysis of said novels with attention to four characteristics of time, place, sender and reader.
As a result, the common element of “multi-layer” in contemporary Persian allegorical novels makes us classify these novels under a sub-genre. This element also makes us distinguish allegorical novels from the other types of novel. This type of novel is also a modern phenomenon which is in conformity with the needs and necessities of modern life that are directly related to political events.

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Knowledge is based on questions, and in every scientific text, a writer is supposed to answer one or some definite question(s). Linguistically speaking, interrogative structure is one of the most important grammatical structures in all languages, and although their grammatical, phonological as well as semantic features are examined in detail, their pragmatic functions have been mainly neglected. For the first time, Hyland (2002) investigated interrogative structure with a pragmatic approach and introduced it as an engagement device to attract readers. In fact, interrogatives along with imperatives, reader pronouns, shared knowledge and appositives constitute five engagement devices in writer-reader interaction. In this model, seven pragmatic functions are outlined for interrogatives: (1) Questions as titles, (2) frame purpose, (3) text organization, (4) establish niche, (5) express evaluation, (6) support claim, and (7) suggest research. The present study examines the pragmatic functions of interrogative in Persian language with the emphasis on academic texts. Three sub-genres, i.e. textbooks, research articles and research reports are taken into account. Due to the different mechanisms practiced in different sciences, the so-called hard-soft divide which distinguishes natural sciences versus humanities is also revisited. The study addresses the following four questions:

1. Are there differences in frequency and pragmatic function of interrogatives among textbooks, research articles and research reports?
2. Are there differences in frequency and pragmatic function of interrogatives between humanities and sciences?
3. Are there differences in frequency and pragmatic function of interrogatives among different fields ?
4. Is there any difference between Persian and English language to handle the pragmatic functions of interrogatives ?

 
This research follows a descriptive-analytical procedure. The statistical population includes undergraduate level scientific textbooks, research articles as well as research reports. Needless to say, all of these sub-genres are written by university professors but each sub-genre addresses especial audience. The sample is collected from the afore-mentioned texts in six humanities fields (Persian literature, linguistics, law, psychology, social sciences, and accounting), and six sciences (mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, biology and computer science).
In each academic field, 6 textbooks, 30 research articles and 4 research reports are selected. Considering 12 fields the corpus of study includes 72 textbooks, 360articles and 48 research reports. The books are original Persian manuscripts (not translated books), articles are selected from two or three peer-referred academic journal, and reports are also written by faculty members in Payam-e Noor University in East Azerbaijan. Since the frequency of interrogatives is counted in 10000 words scale, first the number of words in each text is counted. The sub-genre of textbooks includes 2948020 word (about 3 millions), and articles and research reports have 2112669 (about 2 millions) and 696205 (about 700,000) words respectively. As, such, the whole corpus includes 5756894 (about 5 million and 700,000) words. 
With an eye to the seven pragmatic functions outlined by Hyland (2002), it should be mentioned that in only two texts (two research articles) interrogative structure is employed as the text title. The model’s second function, i.e. frame purpose is the most frequent pattern, as from the 1234 detected interrogatives in the whole corpus, 835 ones (about 70 percent) imply this pragmatic function. Therefore, it can be claimed that in these three genres, writers prefer to present questions in the beginning of their texts and then attempt to provide answers to them. The frequency in the text organization (81) and establish niche (63) is not significant, and the low number of cases in fifth function, i.e. express evaluation shows that the involved writers did not take any critical positions. The frequency of sixth and seventh functions are higher. In sum, for 10000 words of the corpus 2.1 interrogative structure is employed by the writers. 
With respect to the science-humanities divide, it is revealed that the frequency of interrogatives in the humanities (3.1 cases in 10000 words) is much higher than that of sciences (0.9 cases in 10000). 
In only two fields, i.e. linguistics and psychology all seven discourse functions are used, and in most disciplines- especially in sciences- most discourse functions have not been employed by the authors. One noticeable exception to this general pattern is physics, as using interrogatives in this field is apparently more popular than in law and accounting.
To answer the first question of the study, it should be maintained that writers of the three genres under study behave differently as the number of interrogatives in the textbooks is higher than that of research articles and research reports. Articles and reports have quite the same number of interrogatives. To explain the difference, it is maintained that textbooks are mainly prepared for undergraduate students. Student are usually fresh in the subject, and therefore writers are supposed to write explicitly. One method to reach explicitness is to design some questions and then try to answer them. In contrast, articles and research reports are substantially written for peers. The writers, in these cases, believe that the potential readers are academic agents and therefore using engagement devices like interrogatives would be unnecessary. 
With respect to the second research question, it is shown that humanities and sciences behave quite differently as far as using interrogatives is concerned. This finding supports the claims made by Snow (1959,1998) and Tauber (2009) who have recognized substantial differences between humanities and sciences, leading to the long-standing debate as humanities-science divide. 
Regarding the third question, it should be acknowledged that among the very disciplines in both humanities and sciences, writers do not have similar tendency towards using interrogatives. Linguistics and literature-with a little difference- occupy the first and second positions followed by psychology. As stated earlier, in the corpus of sciences, the frequency of interrogatives is lower, although the field of physics is an exception.
To compare the findings of the present study with those of Hyland (2002), it is shown that the frequency reported by Hyland is much higher (7.2 cases in 10000 words) than that of Persian corpus (2.1 cases in 10000 words). It can be concluded that writers in Hong Kong university are eager to use interrogatives structure to attract their readers. To explain the difference, we have to address the subject of writing in two different educational contexts. The students and researchers in Hong Kong are familiar with the basics of the writing in general and academic writing in particular, while their counterparts in Iran lack such competence. To interpret this general tendency it is maintained that in humanities, especially in fields such as linguistics and literature, writers are more familiar with linguistic structures. They are technically more language-aware and therefore act more competently. In contrast, scientists are more rigid in their language, and actually they are taught and recommended to use inflexible, non-humanistic language. Needless to say, an advanced, rigid tone in the text does not require any engagement with the reader.
 
 

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Pragmatics, which is one of the most eminent concepts in the world of language learning and teaching, has established itself in various academic fields. The teachability of pragmatics has been investigated in a plethora of studies (Derakhshan & Shakki, 2020; Shakki et al., 2020), though scant attention has been given to assessing and testing pragmatic features. It has been a long time that practitioners and teachers use traditional assessment to assess students, but with the emergence of new approaches in teaching, there should be new ways to test and assess learners. The present study is theoretically underpinned by Vygotsky’s (1978) Socio-Cultural Theory (SCT), which postulates that a person’ cognition is mediated socially during the interaction, and it emphasizes a mediated relationship not a direct relationship which is the basis for Dynamic Assessment (DA). He believes that the development of a child consists of two levels, namely actual level and potential level of development. Activating the Zone of Proximal Developmnet (ZPD), which is the distance between the actual developmental level and the level of potential development, requires guidance and collaboration. Since assessing the speech acts of apology and request through DA has not been taken into account so far, the present study aimed to find out the effects of DA on the acquisition of Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ speech act of apology and request. To this end, 66 students, selected from Shokouh Language Institute in Kalaleh, Golestan Providence, Iran, participated in this study.
Research Question:
Does dynamic vs. non-dynamic assessments (NDA) have any effect on the acquisition of Iranian intermediate EFL learner’s speech act of apology and request?
Three groups of language learners whose language proficiency was determined by Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT), participated in the present study. The total number of the participants was 85 Iranian learners, from whom 66 were selected as intermediate level whose scores ranged from 24 to 30, according to OQPT. The gender of the students was both male and female, and learners aged from 15 to 19. Their native language was Persian, and they were studying English as a second language. After homogenizing learners, they were divided into three groups, one DA, one NDA, and one control group. Listening pragmatic comprehension test, devised and validated by Birjandi and Derakhshan (2014), was utilized as the pretest and posttest of the study. First, the participants were tested before the intervention; after teaching speech acts to learners (30 apology and request video vignettes that were taken from seasons and episodes of 13 Reasons Why and Suits), the learners were tested by the listening pragmatic comprehension test to compare the results. In this study, to have homogeneous learners for all three groups, the mean and standard deviation of the proficiency test were calculated. To answer the research question, the scores taken from pretest and posttest were submitted to the Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS).
To find the effectiveness of the treatment, the means of control group, NDA group, and DA group were compared. In order to make sure whether or not the groups were statistically different, One-way ANOVA test and post hoc test of Tukey were run. Based on the mean scores for the pretest in one DA and two NDA groups, which are 58.88, 55.92, and 55.67, it is shown that little difference exists among the three groups. However, in order to make sure whether or not the groups are similar statistically, One-way ANOVA test was conducted. The Sig. value is .92 which demonstrates that since this is more than .05, it can be concluded that there is not a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the three groups. On the other hand, the mean scores for the posttest in one DA, NDA, and control group, respectively, were 117.42, 72.83, and 61.58, showing that the groups are different. Furthermore, the Sig. value is 0.00, which is smaller than .05, so this means that the intervention which was implemented in the DA group was effective. Since the obtained value does not show where the significant difference exists, post hoc test of Tukey was used to find the statistical significance between the groups.  The values corresponding with the comparison between the DA group and NDA groups are smaller than .05.
 For this reason, it can be concluded that the difference between DA group and the other two groups is statistically significant. However, the comparison between the two NDA groups revealed that they are not significantly different from each other (p=.392>.05). The results of one-way ANOVA test indicated that there were statistically meaningful differences across groups, and the results of post hoc test of Tukey revealed that dynamic group outperformed both non-dynamic and control groups, but no meaningful difference was found between non-dynamic and control groups although non-dynamic had a better mean score compared to that of control group. Considering the findings of the present study, it is suggested that harmonizing the instruction and testing provides opportunities for the learners, and learning should be individualized in order to have better outcomes. To put it in a nutshell, giving students contextually appropriate input has been a pivotal factor to increase learners’ pragmatic ability while understanding and performing the speech acts. In light of the gained results, the present study offers some implications for teachers, learners, and materials developers. It is suggested that teachers apply DA in their language classrooms to maximize interaction, mediation, and negotiation.

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Metaphor is practised in all languages worldwide. Over the last two decades, investigation on metaphor has relied on some perspectives, such as lexical-constructional, critical, conceptual, axiological, cognitive theory or underlined aspects, as well as semantic and cultural pragmatic as the least of all. This qualitative study focused on how semantic component and cultural pragmatic were used to study the meaning and function of Balinese women metaphor. The purposive sampling method was to collect data from various sources and triangulated it into key informants. The results showed two classifications of Balinese women's metaphors, namely physical perspective as a concrete metaphor that depicts their body parts and personality perspective as an abstract, which emphasizes their ideal role. The pragmatic cultural interpretation involved the cognitive process of declarative analogy that referred to the similarity of values. Meanwhile, the personality perspective metaphor produced higher emotive values than the physical one. Hence, this type of metaphor is used by the Balinese people to advice women.
 
 

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Based on the hypothesis that not only linguistics competence must be considered during the test development, but also pragmatics competence should be evaluated, the present study was conducted to develop a scale to assess learners’ pragmatic proficiency. To this end, this study developed the pragmatics test of multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT) in the case of four primitive speech acts of request, thanks, apology, and refusal for Iranian EFL learners. In the first phase, 155 Iranian university students were asked to write the situations at university, home or in society, in which they apologize, thank, request something and refuse an offer or invitation. In the second phase, to ensure the naturalness of the situations, another group of students were asked to rate the selected situations based on the frequency of occurrence of these situations in their everyday life. In the third phase, the tests were reviewed by several native speakers and TEFL colleagues. Finally, the items MDCT were developed by the researchers and in the final step, two pilot tests were conducted. The findings indicated that the scale was reliable, valid and appropriate to measure Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic knowledge.
1. Introduction
Before enlightening the importance of developing the measurement of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) competence, the main focus was on different aspects of linguistic competence such as syntax, vocabulary, and cohesion (Liu, 2004). However, with the advent of pragmatics teaching and ILP, which are mainly focused on the development of linguistic action competence by nonnative speakers, the requirement in making the traditional assessment compatible with the new way of teaching has become more demanding. However, there is a wide gap between the teaching and testing measures to evaluate the pragmatic knowledge of students. Therefore, over the last decades, evaluating pragmatic competence of leaners by developing reliable and valid measures has drawn attention of many pragmatists (Hudson, Detmer & Brown, 1995).
In recent years, a plethora of studies have attempted to develop pragmatic tests from different perspectives for EFL learners to evaluate the ILP competence. An example is the study carried out by Liu (2007) who developed a pragmatic test for Chinese EFL students to evaluate their pragmatic knowledge in the case of speech act of apology.
 Birjandi and Rezaei (2010) designated a Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) to measure Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic competence for two speech acts of apology and request in educational setting through the same phases as employed by Jianda. Salehi and Isavi (2013) also developed a pragmatics test for Iranian EFL learners in terms of request and apology in academic contexts in Iran, United states, England and Suadi Arabia. However, in spite of a large number of speech acts, their studies solely focused on two speech acts, namely apology and request. Further, they suffer from several major drawbacks during the development of the test, such as the lack of measuring reliability and validity of the developed pragmatic test which may differ among various cultures.
Since there seems to be just one study conducted on developing pragmatic measurement for Iranian EFL learners and teachers, it is apparent that more attention should be paid to and more comprehensive studies should be conducted (Alemi & Khanlarzadeh, 2016). Therefore, the present study seeks to remedy the previous study deficiencies by using statistical procedures and also considering four major speech acts of thanks, request, refusal, and apology. More importantly, the present study attempts to develop a well-known pragmatic assessment of MDCT for Iranian EFL learners. While learners are asked to choose the best option in MDCT, it gauges the participants’ awareness of the speech acts.

2. Methodology
Participants
A total number of 158 participants took part in the present study. There were 11 English native speakers, two university lecturers and 145 EFL university students with an intermediate level of English aged 19-22. They participated in five different steps of the test development process (Table 1). The selection of all participants was based on convenience sampling. 

Table 1.
 Number of Participants in Each Step of the Test Development Process

Steps	Non-native		Native
	university students	University lecturers
1. Exemplar generation	40	--	--
2. Likelihood investigation	30	--	--
3.Metapragmatic Assessment	--	2	2
4. Scenario generation and MDCT development	30	--	9
5. Pilot study I	25	--	--
6. Pilot study II	20	--	--
Sum	145	2	11

The Development of Testing Instruments
The testing instruments consisted of a 32-item Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Task (to measure the awareness of speech acts). Following Birjandi and Rezaei (2010) and Liu (2007), the researchers developed the test items through a process of exemplar generation and likelihood investigation, metapragmatic assessment, and piloting. The following is an overview of the process of test development:
Exemplar generation
In order to know the most frequent situations in which the participants of the study were more likely to use the selected speech acts for this study, 40 TEFL students of Islamic Azad University were asked to write either in Persian or English at least five most probably occurring situations at university, home or in society in which they apologize, thank, ask (request something) and refusal. The purpose of this stage was to find the situational topics which approximate authentic situations the students encounter in their real life. A qualitative analysis of the situations showed that many of them were overlapping and 60 situations (15 situations for each speech act) were selected. In the following examples, some apologies produced by the students are provided:
I always apologize for getting home late.
I always apologize for interrupting my new friend.
Likelihood investigation
To test the naturalness of situations, 30 more students from the same pool were asked to rate the 60 selected situations from 1 to 5 on the basis of the frequency of occurrence and naturalness of these situations in their everyday life. Based on their ratings, 32 scenarios getting the highest mean scores were selected. The minimum number an item needed to get to be selected was 120 out of a maximum of 150 (80%).
Metapragmatic assessment
Following Takimoto (2007) and Liu (2007), the 52 selected situations were reviewed and analyzed according to situational features to balance the situations and promote content validity. This involved assessing the imposition (the burden put on the hearer), power relationship (equal, unequal) and social distance (+/- social distance). This was done to include situations with different metapragmatic features. Thirty-two situations (eight situations for each speech act) were selected to be employed in MDCT. After the metapragmatic assessment, the researcher developed MDCT situations by providing the situational background in detail.
Scenario generation and MDCT development
The 32 selected situations were given to 30 Iranian intermediate EFL learners and also six native speakers of English. The linguistically inaccurate and socially inappropriate responses given by non-native participants were used as distractors and the native speaker’s responses were used as correct options for the MDCT items. Following Hudson et al. (1992; 1995) and Liu (2007), the number of choices for each item was decided to be three. Then, to ensure that the native speakers of English would choose the assigned keys, the test was administered to three native American English speakers. It was found that in most cases all of them chose the keys assigned.
Pilot study I
The pilot study involved 25 freshman male and female university students, aged 18-20, studying TEFL at the Islamic Azad University of Gorgan, a northern city in Iran. They were required to answer the 32-item MDCT in 45 minutes.
Rating MDCT
For rating the MDCT, each correct response was given 1 and the incorrect ones received 0. As mentioned above, to be sure about the correct responses assigned by the researcher, ten native speakers of English were asked to answer the MDCT items. Cronbach’s alpha reliability estimates turned out to be .6 for pretest and posttest.
The process of revising items
The MDCT's reliability index of .6 suggested that there might be some problems regarding the testing method, the students, testing environment, and some other factors. Therefore, an attempt was made to find the causes of the problem and obviate them. To improve the reliability of MDCT, situations were reviewed and elaborated more in detail and the following three statistics were gathered for each item: 1) Item difficulty, 2) distractor analysis, 3) Corrected Item-Total Correlation. On the basis of findings from the first pilot study the following decisions and revisions were applied in the second pilot and the main study:
Pilot Study II
Based on the results of the first pilot study, some changes were made in the MDCT test items. Having applied the changes, the researcher conducted a second pilot study.  It was to check the reliability index of the revised MDCT tests. The participants were 20 freshman TEFL students at Islamic Azad University of Gorgan. Based on the Oxford Quick Placement Test, the participants’ level was either lower-intermediate or upper-intermediate. They were required to answer the questions in 60 minutes. The reliability of the MDCT rubric was calculated at .81 (standardized item alpha).
Discussions and Conclusion
The present study has gone some way towards enhancing our understanding to the role of functional aspect of language in learning language which unfortunately mainly focuses on the grammar side of language in Iran. The study was an attempt to develop a MDCT to measure the pragmatic knowledge of Iranian EFL learners. The study has gone some way towards enhancing our understanding to the role of functional aspect of language in learning language which unfortunately mainly focuses on the grammar side of language in Iran. However, as far as the result of the test was appropriate in Iranian context, it is not obvious if it is equally works out in other context as well. Consequently a number of future studies developing the same measurements in different contexts are apparent. Besides, a further study could assess whether these tests are applicable to other speech acts in other cultures or not.
 

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Considering one of the earliest calls for applying pragmatics in the second language, Kasper and Rose’s (2002) study “Is Pragmatic Teachable?”, pragmatic features have been analyzed during the last 20 years in EFL/ESL contexts. The amalgamation of studies has been conducted on many speech acts around the world within the two decades, among which request, apology, and refusal are considered as the most-appreciated speech acts in Iran. The purpose of the present paper is to unravel the overall effectiveness of the intervention on the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal in an Iranian EFL context. To this aim, out of a total number of 80 studies, 57 papers were chosen based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, which were coded for the analysis. The results of the study revealed that the instruction of request, apology, and refusal is effective and generated a mean of (g = 1.43) which is significant, reflecting a quite large gain of instruction. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies.   
It is about four decades that pragmatics has been at the center of constant theoretical and empirical attention among the theoretician and practitioners around the world (Derakhshan & Shakki, 2021). In order to appropriately construct and reconstruct the meaning of spoken and written utterances, speakers need to have shared background knowledge. Hence, it may be a burden for a person to convey what she/he intends to communicate in a way that enables the interlocutors to find out it in the way that it was intended.
In a nutshell, teaching and assessing pragmatics are justified on the ground that language learners may encounter difficulties to produce and comprehend language appropriately due to cross-cultural mismatches regarding the linguistic and social appropriacy of target language norms, and negative pragmatic transfer from their L1 to L2, to just name a few (Shakki et al., 2021). More importantly, among those studies which have investigated pragmatic instruction (Derakhshan, 2014; Derakhshan & Arabmofrad, 2018; Derakhshan & Eslami Rasekh, 2015, 2020; Derakhshan & Shakki, 2020a; Derakhshan et al., 2020; Jeon & Kaya, 2006; Kasper & Rose, 1999, 2002; Kasper & Roever, 2005; Martínez-Flor & Alcón-Soler, 2005; Plonsky & Zhuang, 2019), none of them thoroughly synthesized the empirical studies on pragmatics to find the lacuna regarding teachability of the pragmatics.
The amalgamation of mentioned studies has been conducted on many speech acts, among which request, apology, and refusal are recognized as the most-appreciated speech acts in Iran. Due to the lack of adequate meta-analyses on the effectiveness of L2 pragmatic instruction (Derakhshan & Shakki, 2021; Shakki et al., 2021), which is under-researched in an Iranian EFL context, this study aimed to meta-analyze the body of research in L2 pragmatic instruction to check its effectiveness. Considering the substantial prominence of ILP in learning and teaching in EFL contexts, the purpose of the present study, as far as meta-analysis is concerned, is to summarize the magnitude and directions of the effects obtained in a series of empirical studies. The aim is to identify the effectiveness of teaching methods in the instruction of pragmatics in an Iranian context.
Apology, request, and refusal are the speech acts that were investigated in the present study. More specifically, the present study was an attempt to pursue the effectiveness of teaching L2 pragmatics, particularly the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal to EFL learners in an EFL context like Iran.  Following a comprehensive search, 80 studies were found to be coded based on the inclusion/exclusion criteria, and in the aggregate, 98 effect sizes reported from the 57 original studies generated a mean of (g = 1.43) which is significant, reflecting a quite large gain of instruction.
Despite the fact that this study may divulge several findings and implications in the field of teaching, and learning of pragmatics, like any other study undertaken so far, the present study is not exempt from limitations as well as delimitations which are enumerated as follows: One limitation is the lack of transparency and subjectivity inherent in this approach. Various reviewers might use different criteria to decide which studies should be included in their review, they may come to contradictory results and opposite conclusions. The second limitation is that the process of the analysis becomes hard and eventually untenable as the number of studies increases whereas a reviewer may be able to synthesize data from a few studies in his/her head. Some of the important studies may be ignored during the data collection, and it can be considered as another limitation. A common limitation of meta-analysis is that researchers combine different sorts of studies (apples and oranges) in the same analysis, so it leads to the argument that the summary effect will ignore possibly important differences across studies. There are still some unpublished studies lying dormant in the researchers’ filing cabinets contributing to the use of the term file drawer problem for meta-analysis which were not included in the current study.
The first delimitation refers to those dimensions of pragmatics that were not included in this investigation. Since pragmatic knowledge includes many more dimensions in each component like speech acts, politeness principles, deixis, conversational structure, presupposition, implicatures, routines, and so on. The present study tried to include the most influential components in ILP which are speech acts, among which request, apology, and refusal were selected to be investigated in this study. Though there appears to be a large amount of research in ILP, the studies which were published between 2000 and early 2020 were included in the present study. One conspicuous delimitation is the number of studies in which instruction was employed and the ones which do not implement instruction were removed from the study. The primary subcategories based on which the current study was conducted can also be extended and other moderator variables can be scrutinized.
Conducting this study brings some implications and suggestions for the researchers whose area of interest is L2 pragmatics. The results may have pivotal pedagogical implications for L2 pragmatics and future research. One of the tremendous implications of this study is that while searching for the speech acts, surprisingly, there were some speech acts that have received no attention such as congratulations, condolences, threats, and challenges, so the researchers may use these untouched areas of English pragmatic instruction for their future studies. The other implication is that the teachers would be able to utilize the most effective treatment types, which led to better performance, comprehension, and production, and they also should take care of other factors such as gender, age, and proficiency level of the learners to have better outcomes. The findings of the present study may be useful for researchers whose area of interest is pragmatics, particularly the speech acts to check the moderator variables which are helpful and predictor in teaching the speech act of request, apology, and refusal.
 

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Knowledge of speech acts and their functions are basic components of pragmatics and the request speech act plays a crucial part in everyday interactions. This study aimed to investigate whether native speakers of English make any differences utilizing the request expressions “would you like” and “would you mind”, their collocations in both spoken and academic contexts and the functional differences caused by the co-text. To this end, the data was retrieved from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results revealed that such expressions in the spoken corpus were used more frequently in the transactional context with equal status and as interactional-oriented. However, in the academic corpus, the same expressions were used more frequently in the pedagogical context with the high-low status and as both interactional-oriented and task-oriented. The expression "would you like" was mostly used to give information, whereas "would you mind" was usually used to request an action. These expressions were not used for the purpose of imposition in any of the two contexts. The study revealed that the collocations didn't affect the function of such requests. In fact, it was the collocating words that changed due to the pragmatic functions and the objectives of the speakers. The findings might contribute to understanding of the variations which matter between the request expressions. Teachers and learners might gain insights into how and when they are used and which collocations are more frequent so as to focus more carefully on them and make informed and proper decisions within pedagogical settings.