Keywords
Abstract
This article examines the compliment — a positive evaluative speech act — as a multilayered pedagogical instrument within the contemporary communicative paradigm of English language teaching (ELT). Adopting a theoretical and empirical review methodology, the study situates the compliment within speech act theory and politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and within established models of communicative competence (Widdowson, 1978; Canale & Swain, 1980), arguing that its systematic instruction develops learners' lexical, grammatical, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic competencies simultaneously. Drawing on the Affective Filter Hypothesis (Krashen, 1982) and the Interaction Hypothesis (Ellis, 1994), the article further demonstrates that compliments lower classroom anxiety, increase motivation, and activate meaning-negotiation processes that deepen input processing. A synthesis of empirical studies spanning four decades — from foundational corpus-based work (Manes & Wolfson, 1981; Holmes, 1988) to recent research on digital and AI-mediated discourse (Placencia & Lower, 2020; Zheng & Huang, 2022; Wang & Derakhshan, 2024) — confirms that explicit compliment instruction enhances learners' sociopragmatic competence, intercultural awareness, and oral fluency. On this basis, the article proposes a five-stage pedagogical model (input flooding, noticing, controlled practice, free production, and reflection) for teaching compliments in the EFL/ESL classroom, together with a mapping of specific compliment-based activities onto core language skills. Finally, the article evaluates the emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI-Enhanced CALL) in compliment instruction, noting both its affordances — unlimited practice, low-stakes interaction, real-time feedback, and cross-cultural comparison — and its current limitation in modeling the indirect, paralinguistically encoded norms of sincerity characteristic of Uzbek compliment culture. The article concludes that AI mediation should be regarded as a complementary rather than a substitutive tool, incapable of fully replacing live teacher–student cultural interaction.