Making a Request for a Service in Spanish: Pragmatic Development in the Study Abroad Setting.

Abstract: This study addresses the development of the request strategies used in two service encounter scenarios by 31 nonnative speakers of Spanish spending 4 months living and studying in Valencia, Spain. The main method of data collection was an open role-play in which participants interacted with a Spanish native speaker. Results show that while there were some aspects of the learners' request production that changed after the study abroad experience, there were other aspects that remained unaffected. Knowing which aspects from the nonnative speakers' request production are acquired and which ones are not after a student has been immersed in the target culture for 4 months is relevant to informing second language acquisition, specifically the field of interlanguage pragmatics in the study abroad setting. Key words: interlanguage pragmatic development, requests for a service, second language acquisition, Spanish pragmatics, study abroad Introduction Common belief suggests that a learner's foreign language improves significantly by studying in the country where that language is spoken. The rich exposure to target language (TL) input and the ample opportunity to use it offered by this context support this belief (Kasper, 2000). However, studies investigating the linguistic effect of the study abroad (SA) experience on the participants' TL have only started to appear in the last few decades and as a result, much more is known about the development of a foreign language in the foreign language setting than in the SA context (Freed, 1995; Huebner, 1998). Interlanguage pragmatics involves learners' ability to interpret, communicate, and interact successfully in different contexts according to the TL rules of appropriateness. The assumption that spending time in the target country is one of the primary means for learners to acquire pragmatic ability makes research in this area an important endeavor. Yet looking at the existing literature in this field, researchers have not found clear results on the effect of the SA experience on the development of interlanguage pragmatics. The results from most studies have shown that after the experience abroad, some aspects of the learners' pragmatic ability tend to change toward the native speaker (NS) norm (Barron, 2003; Cohen, Paige, Shively, Emert, & Hoff, 2005; Cohen & Shively, 2007; Cole & Anderson, 2001; DuFon, 1999; Hassall, 2006; Hoffman-Hicks, 1999; Kondo, 1997; Magnan & Back, 2006; Matsumura, 2001; Schauer, 2004; Shively, 2008). On the other hand, other studies have shown very little or no development in the particular speech act investigated after the SA experience (Rodriguez, 2001; VonCanon, 2006). For example, Cole and Anderson (2001), Magnan and Back (2006), and Schauer (2004) analyzed the development of the request production of learners of different languages (Japanese students of English, American students of French, and Irish students of German, respectively). They all noted some changes toward the NS norm in their participants' request performance after the SA experience. Cole and Anderson (2001) observed that after a 10- month stay abroad, learners' requests became more indirect, and they started using a variety of mitigating devices that they had not used before. Schauer (2004) also observed a correlation between participants' length of stay and their development of internal mitigation on requests. Magnan and Back (2006) noted that those learners whose proficiency had improved after a semester in France also started using more indirect request strategies, similar to the French NS group in their study. Other studies, such as Barron (2003) and Hoffman-Hicks (1999), examined learners' performance of different speech acts, and they found that while the SA experience had an effect on some of the aspects they investigated, it did not have as much of an effect on others. Barron (2003) investigated Irish learners' production of refusals, offers, and requests in German. …