The Acquisition Of Requests By Learners At Different Proficiency Levels Under Explicit Instruction

The study was set up to investigate the acquisition of requests by learners at different proficiency levels under the condition of explicit instruction. A total of 48 college students took part in the study and the PETS 2 was adopted to measure their overall English proficiency. Then the participants were divided into high and low proficiency groups. The data were collected through DCT and were further coded with the coding scheme provided by CCSARP (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) and Hassall (2003). Results show that both groups of learners evidenced changes in the distribution of their request strategies. But low-proficiency learners outperformed high-proficiency learners in the acquisition of request as LP learners reduced the use of direct requests and largely increased hints while HP learners increased their use of direct strategies and hints. The most noteworthy findings come from the aspect of non-conventional indirectness. Although it seems that hints are to be acquired late by learners in ILP literature, learners in the study both increased their use of hints greatly after the instruction. The effectiveness of explicit instruction gives supporting evidence to the noticing hypothesis (Schmidt, 1993). Schmidt (1993) argued that learners need to notice the specific relevant pragmalinguistic and contextual features of an event in order to trigger encoding, and that attention to input is a necessary condition for any learning at all. Results also show that LP learners outperformed HP learners in the acquisition of pragmalinguistic knowledge. In a broad sense, the results of the study also support Bialystok's (1993) two-dimensional model that advanced L2 learners mainly have to acquire processing control over already existing representations and high-proficiency learners can allocate processing resources faster and more accurately than low-proficiency learners. Results in the study show that there is a disparity between grammatical and pragmatic competence development. If high levels of grammatical competence do not guarantee concomitant high levels of pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999, p. 686), high levels of grammatical competence do not guarantee greater pragmatic development either.