The Pragmatics of Making Requests in the L2 Workplace: A Case Study of Language Socialization

Abstract

The workplace is one of many sociocultural contexts where novices within a culture, like immigrant women, become socialized into new discourse systems and cultures. As second language (L2) speakers, the process of language socialization in the workplace involves double socialization: as a novice in a new work environment and as novice operating within a new language and culture. Focusing on L2 requesting behaviour, this ethnographic case study deals with the important issue of the pragmatics of higher-stakes social communications. The contextualized examples provided here illustrate how, through exposure and participation in social interactions and with the assistance of experts or more competent peers, an immigrant woman came to internalize target language and cultural norms and develop communicative competence in ESL in the workplace. More specifically, she learned to make requests more directly than she had been accustomed by adopting certain sociolinguistic strategies and expressions. The research on which this paper is based represents a new direction in TESOL workplace-oriented research, combining interlanguage pragmatics, ethnography, and language socialization.