A Crosssectional Study of Interlanguage Pragmatics: Request, Apology, and Complimentresponse

1
A Cross-sectional Study of Interlanguage
Pragmatics Request, Apology, and
Compliment-response

• Interlanguage Analysis Final Project
• Satoko Kato

2
Motivation

• Pragmatic patterns in the L2 is often not
  explicitly taught in the classroom
• A majority of NNSs
• vocabulary and grammar
• gt
• pragmatic or functional uses of the
  language
• ?Leading miscommunications

3
Rose (1998) Cross-sectional study

• Examined the pragmatic development of students at
  a primary school in Hong Kong.
• Distinct movement from direct to conventionally
  indirect strategies of request, apology, and
  compliment-response in the performance of the
  oldest group.
• Participants completed a cartoon oral production
  task

4

• How about adult learners of different English
  proficiency levels?

5
Research Questions

• What is the range of interlanguage pragmatic
  proficiency in English evidenced in the request,
  apology, and compliment-response strategies of
  three groups of adult Japanese ESL learners?
• English proficiency ? Pragmatic proficiency

6
Subjects

• 11 adult Japanese ESL learners
• Basic (4), Intermediate (4), and Advanced (3)
• Japanese female
• Age ranged between 26 to 44 (average 35)
• All had university level education
• (two participants finished graduate school)
  

7
Data Collection

• Procedure
• Personal questionnaire
• (back ground Information)
• Written production task with pictures.
• Produce sentences for 9 situations
• apology (3), request (3), and
  compliment-response (3)

8
Questionnaire Apology

• Q You broke your friends camera. What will you
  say in this situation?

9
Results Request
10
Supportive move
11
Results Apology
12
Compliment-response

• Q Your friend said that you have a nice
  bag.What will you say in this situation?

13
Results Compliment-response
14
Findings

• Pragmatic performance ? English proficiency
• Basic-level learners
• 1) Did not show any supportive move in
  requests,
• 2) Did not use intensifiers and repair
  strategy in apology,
• 3) Showed highest agree and return strategy
  in compliment- response
• All three groups used indirect strategies (avoid
  using direct strategies)

15
a strategy in Compliment-response

• Length of written production.
• Japanese gt non-Japanese
• Non-Japanese Simple and short answers
• e.g., Thank you! Thanks!
• Japanese a strategy
• e.g., Thank you very much, I like it. I
  bought it in the shop in SOHO.
• Thank you very much, I am very glad to
  hear that. Ill do my best next.