Interlanguage Pragmatics of EFL Advanced Learners: Insights from a Longitudinal Study into the Development of the Speech Act of Request in the Polish Context
In this paper the acquisition of pragmatic competence in English among advanced Polish learners of English is investigated. 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 mostly following Blum Kulka et al. (1989) Rue and Qiao (2008) Takahashi (2001) and Bardovi Harlig (2001) This means that internal and external mitigating devices were investigated together with strategies for expressing directness of requests. On this basis, conclusions about the interlanguage pragmatic competence of the participants are drawn. Also, selected aspects of L2 pragmatics which may require further instruction are mentioned.