Adult Second Language Learners’ Pragmatic Development in the Study-abroad Context: A Review

Abstract

This article aims to further probe this complex relationship between the study abroad context and pragmatic development by synthesizing existing research studies under the guidance of two questions: 1) What pragmatic features have been examined in the study abroad context, and how have they been measured? and 2) Do adult L2 learners improve their pragmatic competence in the study abroad context over time?

Complaints in L2 French

“…This result has been observed in prior studies on the development of L2 pragmatic competence by learners cross-linguistically (e.g., Tran, 2002;Xiao, 2015). It is possible that more proficient learners overestimate or underestimate the norm for the pragmatic feature.…”

“…Reiterating my earlier point, only when separating the three most and the three least L2 proficient participants was there a noticeable difference in complaint perception, but this sample is too small to make any claims. Therefore, responding to Xiao's (2015) statement, the results in my study suggest that L2 proficiency does not impact complaint perception in the aural mode, except in very specific social contexts (i.e., superior social distance).…”

“…Even when the L2 group was separated into three groups of proficiency there were no noteworthy differences in their complaint perception, except when looking at superior social distance. Thus, the results indicate that participants enrolled in upper-division university courses may perceive complaints similarly, despite differences in proficiency (Xiao, 2015).…”

“…In this study, complaint perception consists of complaint identification and the naturalness rating of complaints. As discussed earlier, research suggests that accurately identifying complaints poses less difficulty for L2 learners than accurately rating the naturalness of the complaints based on TL norms (e.g., Cupach & Carson, 2002;Xiao, 2015). This is particularly true of more proficient L2 learners, though most studies have been crosssectional with few investigating complaint perception by more proficient L2 learners (e.g., Gallaher, 2014 (1) What is the complaint perception behavior of monolingual L1 French and L1…”

The Effect Of Study Abroad And Intensity Of Interaction On The Development Of L2 Pragmatic Routines By Chinese Learners Of English

“…In the interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) eld, SA has been widely acknowledged as a bene cial context for pragmatic development and various pragmatic features have bene ted from it (Xiao, 2015). There has been a large number of researches dealing with pragmatic features such as speech acts, informal style, and implied meaning, while investigations focusing on pragmatic routines are still scarce.…”