The Longitudinal investigation which provides the basic material for this book consists of a corpus of requests, offers and refusals of offers elicited from Irish learners of German over a ten-month study abroad period using production questionnaires and a variety of metapragmatic instruments.

This book investigates the ways that advanced speakers of Korean as a second language perceive, use and learn the complexities of the Korean honorifics system. Despite their advanced proficiency in Korean, the study shows that the honorifics use of these speakers diverges in crucial ways from native speaker norms. It is argued that, rather than reflecting the language competence of these speakers as such, this usage is linked to questions of the identity of “language learners” and “foreigners” in Korean society. In addition, it shows the influence of conflicting ideologies regarding the “meaning” of “politeness”. This argument is backed up by rich data collected through mixed methods (discourse completion tests, role-plays, natural interactions, introspective interviews), allowing for a detailed picture of how the honorifics use of second language speakers emerges in context. The book concludes by discussing the implications of the study for politeness research, interlanguage pragmatics and language pedagogy.

This book investigates request strategies in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and is one of the first attempts to address cross-cultural strategies employed in the speech act of requests in two non-Western languages. The data, drawn from role-plays and naturally recorded conversations, complement each other in terms of exhaustiveness and authenticity. This study explores the similarities and differences of the request patterns that emerged in the Chinese and Korean data, and the intricate relation between request strategies and social factors (such as power and distance). The findings raise questions about the influence of methodology on data, and the applicability of so called universals to East Asian languages. They also offer new insights into generally held ideas of directness and requesting behaviours in Chinese and Korean, and the problems of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication.This research is suggestive for the disciplines of cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, contrastive linguistics, applied linguistics and discourse analysis.

As a field of inquiry, interlanguage pragmatics reflects the growing interest in recent years in understanding the social and pragmatic aspects of second language acquisition. Interlanguage Pragmatics offers an up-to-date synthesis of current research in the field, documenting from diverse perspectives the development, comprehension, and production of pragmatic knowledge in a second language. The book consists of three sections. The first concerns cognitive approaches to interlanguage pragmatic development; the second, interlanguage speech act realization of a variety of speech acts; and the third, discoursal perspectives on interlanguage. Each section is prefaced by an introduction by the editors which provides relevant theoretical and methodological background. The editors' general introduction offers a critical overview of the issues currently debated. This book is the first to exclusively address the pragmatic dimension in second language acquistion, presenting a state-of-the-art view of the field and outlining directions for future research.

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to interlanguage request modification. It is a collection of empirical studies carried out by an international array of scholars which provides insights for researchers, graduate students and language teachers on patterns of interlanguage request modification in a range of research contexts and linguistic/cultural settings. The research in this volume takes the reader from a consideration of interlanguage request modification in naturally-occurring e-mail data, through to elicited data from e-DCT questionnaires on cyber-consultations, to the interactive oral discourse of requests in open role-plays. As a whole, the contributions incorporate research with learners from a range of proficiency levels and from diverse linguistic/cultural backgrounds while the chapters individually examine developmental aspects of interlanguage request modification, requests in electronic contexts, comparative learner/native speaker requests, and instructional effects on mitigation. The book will undoubtedly become an important reference for researchers and teachers not only in the field of pragmatics but also in second language acquisition, language teaching, (socio-)linguistics and discourse analysis.

Pragmatic instruction has received momentous attention in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) over the last decades. In order to scrutinize the effectiveness of L2 instruction, meta-analyses are warranted; nonetheless, meta-analyses have been largely neglected, despite the fact that they provide a systematic explanation of the findings from the previous studies. Since meta-analysis is flourishing by leaps and bounds in each and every field, pragmatic studies are not the exception, and among miscellaneous constructs and units of analysis in pragmatics, the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal are investigated in this book. To bridge this gap, this book mainly presents the variables which can moderate the effectiveness of L2 instruction such as age, gender, proficiency, outcome measures, psycholinguistic features, research design, and treatment types. The first chapter of the book outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the study, accentuating the importance of conducting meta-analysis in this field of study. The second chapter elaborates on the empirical studies and a thorough review of the relevant research. The third chapter deals with the design of the study in which the inclusion and exclusion criteria, effect size calculation, coding of the variables, and reliability have been outlined while chapter four presents the obtained outcomes and results of the study. The last chapter describes the final remarks of the study, the limitations, implications, and the directions for future research in the field of pragmatics instruction.

Requests, a speech act people frequently use to perform everyday social interactions, have attracted particular attenTION IN Politeness theories, pragmatics, and second language acquisition. This book looks at request behaviours in a significant EFL population - Chinese speaking learners of English. It will draw on recent literature, such as politeness theories and cognitive models for interlanguage pragmatics development, as well as placing special emphasis on situational context and formulaic language to provide a more fine-grained investigation. A rnage of request scenarios has been specifically designed for this project, from common service encounters to highly face-threatening situations such as borrowing money and asking a favour of police officer. Our findings on Chinese-style pragmatic behaviours and patterns of pragmatic development will be of value to cross-cultural pragmatics researchers, TESOL professionals, and university students with an interest in this area of study.