What Counts as Evidence of Pragmatic Transfer in University EFL? A Critical Narrative Review

Abstract

University learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) need to interpret interpersonal meanings, manage academic relationships, and adapt communication across institutional and intercultural encounters. Although existing syntheses establish that second-language pragmatics is teachable, a more specific question remains unresolved. When do measured improvements justify claims that learning extends beyond the instructional task? This critical narrative review evaluates evidence of learning transfer in university EFL pragmatics instruction. It distinguishes direct university EFL interventions from adjacent settings, non-intervention studies, and potentially overlapping research syntheses. The analysis separates gains in pragmalinguistic resources, sociopragmatic judgment, and interactional responsiveness from their application to untrained tasks or contexts. Retention after a delay is treated as a separate temporal dimension. Meta-analytic evidence supports instruction overall, but neither a universal advantage for explicit instruction nor automatic learning transfer from controlled assessments is established. University studies of e-mail instruction, oral feedback, computerized learning, and chatbot assistance show promising task-specific gains, while differences in comparison conditions and measurement constrain stronger claims. The review proposes an evidence-to-transfer framework linking identifiable learner needs to plausible instructional mechanisms, corresponding assessment indicators, and explicit boundary conditions. The principal contribution is a distinction among learning an assessed pragmatic target, retaining that learning, and applying it in new university situations. Longitudinal, cross-task, multi-institutional studies are needed to test these links.