Children's requestive behavior in L2 Greek: The core request

Abstract

In interlanguage pragmatics, the request development of young learners has been rather underresearched, often without being compared with baseline (L1) data. The present study explores the request behavior of two intermediate proficiency groups of primary school children (8- and 11-year-olds, respectively) who learn Greek in an immersion setting. A Cartoon Oral Production Task was designed to elicit requests of differentiated degree of imposition which were addressed to familiars and strangers, adults or peers. The base constructions which emerged from the data analysis were compared to those deployed by age-matched L1 Greek-speaking children. The L2 participants of the study exhibited a more extended requestive repertoire and a more sophisticated sociopragmatic sensitivity than reported in previous research. Convergences and divergences from their L1 peers’ behavior across communicative situations point to a developmental phase in their interlanguage which could be best pictured as midways along the path defined by the pragmalinguistics-sociopragmatics continuum. Findings of the study can more generally contribute to descriptive and methodological issues in child L2 pragmatic development research.