Children’s Requestive Behavior in L2 Greek: Beyond the Core Request

Abstract

The study focuses on the frequency and distribution of supportive moves (SMs) produced by L2 Greek child learners to frame their requests as an index of young learners’ ability to take into account sociocultural parameters of the communicative situation (cost of the requested action, speaker–addressee relationship). It draws on a corpus of data elicited via a Cartoon Oral Production Task in order to explore the request performance among 51 learners of Greek at two intermediate levels vis a vis 37 L1 Greek children of the same age groups (8- and 11-year-olds). SMs, i.e. pre- or post-positioned modifiers to the core request, have been claimed to be an easily accessible strategy for adult L2 learners to mitigate the imposition of the request from the early stages of L2 proficiency, even if not always in a native-like fashion. Regarding child L2 requestive behavior, previous research into school-aged learners of English reveals restricted use of SMs at the more advanced level only. However, our data shows earlier signs of sociopragmatic awareness. Although the L2 participants of the study lag behind their L1 peers, they used SMs more frequently, more appropriately and in a more native-like fashion than reported in previous research. SMs are particularly preferred in high cost and low familiarity situations in both learners and native speakers, thus indicating a common developmental path on their way to producing sociopragmatically sensitive requests with increasing age and proficiency. Implications of findings for young learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development are further discussed.