Resumen de Interlanguage Pragmatics in Academic English: Analysis of Requests Produced by EFL Learners
My primary concern in this chapter is with developmental issues in language learners' acquisition of pragmatics, ie, interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) in the academic context. A sample of linguistic written data was collected in a discourse completion task of an open response format, in a longitudinal study on EFL acquisitional pragmatics. The responses provided, in this particular case requests, were studied following a format worked out inter alia by Blum-Kulka et al.(1989), Rue and Qiao (2008) and Takahashi (2001). That means especially that internal and external mitigating devices were investigated together with strategies for expressing directness of requests. On this basis, conclusions pertaining to the interlanguage pragmatic competence of the participants are drawn. The data collected in the second year of the study indicate positive developments towards the target language pragmatic competence, especially a wider use of mitigated request strategies, fewer grounders and a higher frequency of syntactic internal mitigation.
