81011991

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Criterial Pragmalinguistic Features of Requestive Speech Acts Produced by Japanese Learners of English

Learner Corpus Studies in Asia and the World

4

1-23

神戸大学国際コミュニケーションセンター

2020-03-17

2020-03-13

The current study aims to investigate how Japanese learners of English develop their pragmalinguistic competence using a cross-sectional method by extracting the criterial pragmalinguistic features of requestive speech acts produced by Japanese learners of English at the Common European Framework of Reference of Languages (CEFR) A1, A2, and B2 levels. The author identified the linguistic patterns of requests in shopping role-play tasks from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) Japanese Learner English (JLE) Corpus, revising the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) coding scheme developed by Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989). While A1 and A2 learners were given a general purchasing task, B1 learners were given a negotiation task. Derived from the chi-square tests, the results reported significant differences in the occurrences of particular features among the proficiency levels. A1 learners produced significantly higher ratios of ellipses, phrases with topic-comment structures (e.g., “Color is brown.”), and declarative statements without any use of tense inflections and modal verbs than A2 learners did, where modality, such as will and would like, and conventionalised patterns, such as “Do you have/Are there...?”, started to appear. B1 learners produced the use of can and could in interrogatives three times more than A2 learners did. Although the criterial features distinguishing proficiency levels were statistically obtained, it was not clear how much the task difference determined the choice of the pragmalinguistic features of requests: B1 learners may have been more concerned with face-threatening acts (FTA) and tended to be more indirect than A2 learners.

manual annotation schemes

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