Getting better in getting what you want: Language learners' pragmatic development in requests during study abroad sojourns (original) (raw)
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Making a Request for a Service in Spanish: Pragmatic Development in the Study Abroad Setting
Foreign Language Annals, 2010
Abstract: This study addresses the development of the request strategies used in two service encounter scenarios by 31 nonnative speakers of Spanish spending 4 months living and studying in Valencia, Spain. The main method of data collection was an open role-play in which participants interacted with a Spanish native speaker. Results show that while there were some aspects of the learners' request production that changed after the study abroad experience, there were other aspects that remained unaffected. Knowing which aspects from the nonnative speakers' request production are acquired and which ones are not after a student has been immersed in the target culture for 4 months is relevant to informing second language acquisition, specifically the field of interlanguage pragmatics in the study abroad setting.
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2017
This study examines pragmatic acquisition of requests for English-speaking learners of Spanish. This research expands upon previous work by investigating the acquisition of second language requests during a short-term immersion program (6 weeks) in Madrid, Spain and in three situational contexts: food and drink, general merchandise, and familial. Data were collected using an experimental computerized oral discourse completion task. Requests made by learners (501 requests) and native speakers (224 requests) were compared considering personal deictic orientation and directness of the requests. For learners, shifts from speaker-oriented to hearer-oriented requests indicated greater pragmatic development in food and drink and familial contexts. Results are discussed considering pragmatic developmental stages and differential results in the three contexts.
Intercultural Communication Education, 2019
This paper documents a cross-sectional look at L1 transfer and L2 contact for learners of English in a UK study abroad (SA) context. The study employed an instructional experimental design over a 6-month period with 34 Chinese students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction. Instruction took place prior to departure for the UK and performance was measured based on a pretest-posttest design using an oral computer-animated production test (CAPT). This paper explores the data in two specific ways. Firstly, the request data were analysed at the pre-and delayed test stages (six months into the study abroad period) to analyse the extent to which participants' reliance on L1 request strategies and language changes over time. Secondly, we measured the amount and type of contact with English which participants reported prior to and six months into the study abroad period. Results show that instruction facilitated development of pragmatically appropriate request language over time, with instructed learners showing significantly less reliance on L1 transfer than non-instructed learners. Contact with English increased significantly for both groups on all measures of language production but not all receptive contact with English. When compared, there was no significant difference between the groups' contact with English at each stage, suggesting that instruction did not result in significantly more interaction with English during the study abroad period.
Acts of Requesting as Realized by English for Specific Purposes Students
The success of language learners' intercultural communication highly depends on their acquisition of not only grammatical knowledge but also pragmatic aspects of the target language. However, research examining English for specific purposes (ESP) learners' request realization, as a crucial indicator of pragmatic competence, still remains a paucity of evidence. Addressing this issue, the present study aims to examine English for specific purposes (ESP) students' most frequently used request strategy and their reasons behind the selected strategy. To this end, 36 ESP students of a public university at Surakarta Indonesia were involved in a descriptive qualitative study. A set of Discourse Completion Test (DCT), role-play, and semi-structured interview were employed as a means of data collection. The data were analyzed based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain's Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) and followed by thematic content analysis for the interview responses. The results depicted that conventionally indirect request were the most frequently used strategy by the students than other strategies, i.e. direct request and non-conventionally indirect request. The semistructured interview further revealed that cultural factors, degree of politeness, and social distance among the interlocutors became the primary reasons of the students' massive selection of conventionally indirect strategy. These results offer fruitful insights for English language teaching stakeholders as an effort to equip ESP students with satisfactory pragmatic and cross-cultural knowledge.
Developing spoken requests during UK study abroad
Second language pragmatic development in study abroad contexts
The present study tracks the longitudinal pragmatic development of spoken requests by Japanese, adult learners of English during an academic year abroad, and aims to examine whether and how their requestive performance develops over time in high and low-imposition situations. Data were collected at three points of the academic year using oral, virtual role plays, and semi-structured group interviews. Data analysis examined the type and frequency of request strategies and modification devices employed by the group over time. Findings revealed that there were only some pragmatic gains (e.g., a slight drop in the use of want statements) as learners were very slow in adopting a new form-function mapping and expanding their pragmalinguistic repertoire. They relied on (and overused) a limited set of request sequences and had clear preferences for particular ways to express (in)directness, confirming that pragmatic gains might often be small, and development may follow a non-linear traject...
High-level requests: A study of long residency L2 users of English and French and native speakers
Journal of Pragmatics, 2012
With few exceptions the field of L2 pragmatics has focussed on intermediate and advanced learners and there is little knowledge to date regarding highly proficient, immersed L2 speakers' pragmatic performance. This study concerns L2 speakers having been immersed culturally and professionally for a considerable length of time. Our focus is on-line production of the request sequence by Swedish speakers of L2 English and L2 French having lived and worked approximately 10 years in the L2 country against matched native controls. The task is a role play between an employee and her/his boss implying high demands on the pragmatic knowledge of the participants. Our main results indicate that both groups of L2 users significantly underuse lexical and syntactic downgraders. It is argued in this paper that this underuse is not due to a lack of pragmalinguistic resources, i.e., they use the same types as the native speakers, but is of a socio-pragmatic nature, i.e., they do not downgrade to the same extent. Furthermore, L2 users significantly underuse 'situation-bound' routinized formulaic sequences for expressing the Head act. This result, in contrast, points to a lack of pragmalinguistic resources.
Request-Making Pragmatics in EFL Learners: A Case of Supportive Moves
International Journal of Society, Culture & Language, , 2024
This study addresses the gap in research on the interlanguage pragmatic knowledge of Saudi English learners across two proficiency levels. Recognizing the lack of understanding of interlanguage charac- teristics within the Saudi context, the research conducts a comprehensive examination of interlanguage pragmatic competence in High Achievers students (HAs) and Low Achievers students (LAs). Using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) that incorporates essential social variables such as power (P) and distance (D), the study aims to elicit supportive moves in request utterances. Findings indicated that HA students significantly employed a wider variety of linguistic patterns in mitigated request utterances in comparison to LAs. HAs demonstrated awareness of both social power and distance in realizing and producing speech acts, while LAs exhibited less consciousness of social variables influencing external modifications. The study further emphasizes the substantial impact of language proficiency on the use of supportive moves among Saudi EFL learners.
System, 2017
The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of explicit interventional treatment on developing pragmatic awareness and production of spoken requests in a study abroad context (taken here to mean those studying/using English for academic purposes in the UK) with Chinese learners of English at a British higher education institution. The study employed an experimental design over a 6 month period with 34 students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction. Instruction took place prior to departure for the UK and performance was measured based on a pre-, immediate and delayed post-test design using a computer-animated production test (CAPT); an oral discouse completion test (DCT). The findings revealed that explicit instruction facilitated development of pragmatically appropriate request language in the short term and, to some extent, this was sustained over time. The CAPT data was also analysed in order to examine the use of internal and external modification of requests by each group. Results demonstrate that the explicit instruction group used significantly more modification at the immediate post-test stage but that the control group used significantly more at the delayed test stage.
Interlanguage request modification: a case in vocational college
Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2018
There has been much attention given by scholars to the investigation of inter-language pragmatics (ILP), and some of them have been concentrating on how ILP speakers modify their speech acts (SA) of request. This study was aimed at investigating request modification produced by Indonesian English speakers. A group of 23 college students majoring in tourism was involved as research participants. The participants were given two tests using two role play cards with two hotel-context request situations, i.e. low imposing request (R-Rq) and high imposing request (R+ Rq). Pretest was given prior to and post-test was given upon treatment. The situation was chosen based on [1] exemplar generation 1 model. The data of request utterances was analyzed and compared with request taxonomies proposed by some scholars. Data analysis showed that the research participants were more competent pragmatically upon the treatment, indicated with the fact where they were able to produce 13 request modification patterns being compared to 11 patterns prior to the treatment.
Use of conventional indirect strategies in requests by Turkish EFL learners
Use of conventional indirect strategies in requests by Turkish EFL learners, 2020
Over the last three decades, the literature on L2 pragmatics has presented many studies on both pragmatic competence and how to improve pragmatic competence in EFL contexts (Taguchi 2011 and 2015). Taguchi (2015) described pragmatic competence as follows: “Pragmat-ic competence refers to one’s knowledge of linguistics, norms and social conventions, and one’s ability to use these knowledge bases in a socially-bound interaction.” (p.1).