Pragmatic Development in Request Performance: A Cross-Sectional Study of Greek EFL Learners

The present study uses a cross-sectional design in order to systematically investigate interlanguage pragmatic performance and to shed more light on L2 pragmatic development. It analyses and compares learners’ production across three proficiency levels, and examines whether learners who receive classroom instruction in a FL context show pragmalinguistic development in making requests as their English language proficiency improves. The data are collected through interactive role-plays and the analysis focuses on request head acts, internal modification, and request perspective. The results suggest that, although there is some development with increasing proficiency, even the advanced learners’ performance lags far behind native speakers in the pragmatic areas examined. The study identified specific stages in the development of learners’ requests; however, the predominance of directness across all levels and the reversed developmental trend of request perspective pointed towards the influence of the L1 on the learners’ pragmalinguistic performance, particularly in the foreign language context.