Raising learners’ attention to refusals during Focus on Form interaction: Does the interlocutor matter?

Scholars have emphasized the importance of interaction in the process of SLA (see García Mayo and Alcón 2013 for a review). Even though instructional language settings have been described as impoverished settings where opportunities for pragmatic learning are scarce (Kasper 1997), very few studies have analysed the benefits of interaction for pragmatic learning (Alcón 2002; Martín-Laguna and Alcón 2012). Therefore, the focus of this paper is to explore whether different types of interlocutor provide opportunities for pragmatic learning during the performance of a focused task. Twenty-one secondary school learners of English were asked to reconstruct a dialogue focused on the speech act of refusals. The participants were divided into two groups: group A interacting with teachers and group B interacting with peers. Attention to pragmatics was measured by means of language related episodes (LREs). Our findings suggest that interaction with different interlocutors (teacher vs. peer) provides opportunities for pragmatic learning during the performance of refusal-focused tasks in teacher-learner interaction, but not on the targeted speech act. These results are discussed in relation to their pedagogical implications.