The Implementation of ISSECI Model for Enhancing Thai EFL Students’ Intercultural Pragmatic Competence: Politeness Strategies

Regarding pedagogical purpose, Thai EFL learners’ communicative English proficiency is obviously restricted by the limited experiences of L2 politeness strategies. The aim of the current study is to investigate the effectiveness of the innovative teaching, ISSECI Model in terms of intercultural pragmatic competence: face threatening ace (FTA) – Do FTA and Don’t do FTA. The twenty Thai EFL undergraduate students from Rajabhat University were selected as participants through simple random sampling. Data were collected using rejoinder-discourse completion task mixed with open time free response construction, and was statistically analyzed in MEAN, standard deviation, and t-test. The findings revealed that the participants’ intercultural pragmatic competence after learning through ISSECI Model is significantly higher than that before the experiment (*p < 0.05). The participants’ perception with regard to ISSECI Model included four domains, i.e., English knowledge gained, cultural awareness, strengths, and weaknesses of the model.