Limited knowledge of pragmatics (the socio-cultural 'rules' of interaction in a community and how they are realised in language) can constitute a barrier to successful communication in a second language (Eslami-Rasekh, 2005; Yates, 2008), particularly for advanced learners whose pragmatic mistakes are regarded as more serious than grammatical errors by native speakers (Bardovi-Harlig and Dornyei, 1998). Recent research indicates that L2 pragmatics can be taught and are in general best learned by explicit instruction (Jeon and Kaya, 2006).