The term pragmatics was coined by Charles Morris, a philosopher of language in (1938), to label “the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters,” thereby locating this new filed of linguistic analysis within semiotics (cited in LoCastro, 2012). Pragmatics is “the study of language from the point of view of the users, especially the choices they make, the constrains they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication (Cristal, 1985: 240). Pragmatics is the sub-filed of linguistic that looks at the meaning of utterances in context, it is often discussed in contrast to semantic but when the utterances are interpreted with reference to context
Bardovi-Harlig (2001) states that many aspects of L2 pragmatics are not acquired without the benefit of instruction, or in the best case, they are learned more slowly. Different Figures such as Bardovi-Harling and Mahan-Taylor (2003) Ishihara and Cohen (2010), did some important investigations and proved that teaching pragmatic knowledge should be considered as important as teaching linguistic knowledge. Another issue to be considered is how to teach interlanguage pragmatics as there are various modes of teaching pragmatics, especially speech acts in a way that help EFL learners to improve their second/foreign language
Through this study, the researcher hopes to find out how effective explicit and implicit instructions are in helping students gain pragmatic knowledge of speech acts of request and the ability to use them appropriately in communication. The present study chooses request as the target of pragmatic instruction in that the knowledge of speech acts and their functions are a basic component of communication in a second or foreign language, and request is one of the most difficult speech acts to be acquired. Many studies have found that instruction of pragmatic knowledge can facilitate the development of EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. However, few studies were done in Iranian EFL classroom settings, and the effects of various approaches to different modes of teaching pragmatic knowledge are still