Abstract
The purpose of the present study is to examine the effect of instruction on pragmatic development in second language (L2) writing. Wishnoff (1999) investigated the effect of instruction on L2 pragmatic acquisition in writing with a particular focus on the functions of hedges, such as modal verbs, modal adverbs, and lexical verbs. The result shows that there are two main effects and an interactional effect. This research particularly focuses on the development of modal words which function as aggravating and mitigating the argument in academic writing. The participants for this research were undergraduate students who were taking an ESL writing course as a requirement. In the immediate-post test, students in the experimental group, who received explicit instruction on modality, use significantly outperformed the students in the control group, who received zero treatment. However, the durability of the instructional effect and the effect of different types of instruction (explicit/implicit/zero treatment) still remain to be explored in further studies.
