'Ehm...excuse me, but...have you forgotten to remember?' - Politeness Strategies in Remindings: A Study of the Pragmatic Competence of Danish Advanced Learners of English

Abstract

This thesis investigates the pragmatic competence of Danish advanced L2 learners of English. More specifically, the thesis focuses on the learners’ politeness strategies when performing the understudied speech act remindings. With the purpose to look at learners’ reminding strategies, the thesis survey was performed by means of a discourse completion task, a method which is commonly used in second language research. Aiming to find possible indications of language transfer, the learners were asked to answer to situations in L1 Danish in addition to L2 English. A group of native English speakers were moreover included in the survey, against whose answers the learners’ would be compared and contrasted. Results show that even advanced learners may have difficulties reminding in L2 English, and that they may rely on L1 pragmatic norms when communicating in a second language.