Second Language Pragmatic Development

The focus of Interlanguage Pragmatics research has predominantly been on second language use, rather than development. The present study investigated the second language pragmatic development of Chinese learners at three proficiency levels by focusing on their acquisition of the English speech act of requests. Following a cross-sectional design, the study collected the data of low, intermediate and advanced learners (37, 40 and 57 informants respectively) and of both English native speakers (ENS) and Chinese native speakers (CNS) (36 and 45 informants respectively) as comparison. The data were elicited by a background questionnaire, an open questionnaire with 10 request scenarios and a metapragmatic assessment questionnaire to obtain the demographic information of informants, the production data of requests and the informants'perception of social parameters respectively. The data were analyzed with a coding scheme of requests adapted from the CCSARP by Blum-Kulka et al (1989). Three illocutionary aspects of requests—request strategies, internal modification and external modification were examined to find out the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features of learners'requests.The major findings are summarized as follows:1. Of the three directness levels of request strategies, conventionally indirect strategies were strongly preferred by Chinese learners as well as ENS and CNS while hints were the least used. Specifically, the employment of imperatives, most frequently used by low proficiency learners, decreased with proficiency. The advanced learners employed significantly more conventionally indirect strategies than both low and intermediate learners. Although none of the learner groups differed significantly from ENS in the frequency of conventionally indirect strategies, examination of the sub-strategies indicated that they differed from ENS in terms of the content and variety of request strategies. In addition, low, intermediate learners and ENS had more cases of opting out and invalid responses in the open questionnaire than the advanced learners and CNS. The reason for learners to opt out was probably the lack of adequate linguistic means and target pragmatic knowledge, whereas ENS did so due to awkwardness of the situations per se.