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A Research-Based Approach For Teaching Written Apologies To English For Academic Purposes Learners, Lisa Leopold

MITESOL Journal: An Online Publication of MITESOL

This article describes a research-based approach for teaching written personal, corporate, and public apologies to advanced English language learners. Following an explicit-inductive approach, the proposed lessons incorporate authentic input, metapragmatic explanation, noticing activities, corpus-based exercises, and empirically based research findings, all of which have been shown to enhance learners’ sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic competence. Learners apply research findings to analyze authentic apologies, revise them for greater sincerity, and use a corpus to expand the range of expressions for apologizing. The pedagogical activities expand the scope of written pragmatics instruction which has been relatively under-represented in the field of pragmatics.