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Abstract
In recent years, English education in Vietnam has increasingly emphasized communicative competence and the use of English for interaction as the country shifts toward a more ESL-oriented context. However, classroom instruction still largely prioritizes grammatical knowledge and linguistic accuracy over pragmatic aspects of communication. Within communicative competence, the ability to perform speech acts appropriately is essential, as effective interaction requires sensitivity to social context, power relations, and cultural norms. Among speech acts, requests are particularly important due to their variability across languages and their role in managing interpersonal relationships. Despite this significance, instructional approaches to teaching requests remain underexplored in Vietnam.
This study examines how role-play activities can be used to teach the speech act of requests in Vietnamese English communication classes and how they support the development of students’ intercultural pragmatic competence. Adopting a classroom-based case study design, the research involved 41 freshmen enrolled in an English communication course at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, HUFLIT University. Data were collected through classroom observations, recordings of role-play interactions, and students’ task performances, and were analyzed using pragmatic discourse analysis.
The findings show that role-play enhances students’ ability to perform the speech act of requests appropriately across diverse social contexts and provides empirical evidence for integrating pragmatic, interaction-based instruction. These results highlight the significance of role-play as a pedagogically effective approach in facilitating the transition from grammar-focused EFL practices to a more communicative, socially grounded ESL-oriented approach in Vietnam.
Keywords: intercultural pragmatic competence, role-play, speech acts (requests), ESL-oriented pedagogy
