Developing spoken requests during UK study abroad
A longitudinal look at Japanese learners of English
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
trajectory.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1SA research and request development
- 2.2Japanese learners of English and requests
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Participants
- 3.2Data collection
- 3.3Coding and analysis
- 4.Findings
- 4.1Overview of request performance T1–T3
- 4.2Syntactic request forms
- 4.3Lexical modification (lexical/phrasal mitigators)
- 4.4Emergent interlanguage request features
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion and limitations
-
References
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Cited by (3)
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2023.
Pragmatic Development in Study‐Abroad Contexts. In
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,
► pp. 1 ff.
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Halenko, Nicola & Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis
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The Language Learning Journal 50:4
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Ren, Wei
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Second Language Pragmatics,
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