Length of stay abroad: Effects of time on the speech act of requesting
Abstract
By means of a discourse completion test (DCT) and a discourse elicitation test (DET) this study investigates the awareness and production of requests and request act modifiers of 104 non native speakers of English from 31 nationalities during different lengths of stay in the UK. The paper first of all provides a brief overview of studies that deal with pragmatic development and periods abroad and then, describes the data collection procedure and methodology employed. Results show that the early stages of a stay abroad are decisive in developing an awareness of pragmatic infelicities. With respect to production of requests, our results do not show statistically significant differences, suggesting that length of stay does not affect request act use. There is also evidence that learners in the study abroad context increase their pragmatic repertoire of internal and external modifiers at later stages of their stay in the UK.
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