L2 Request Realization, an investigation into interlanguage pragmatics and speech act performance of Norwegian learners of English

Abstract

This thesis investigates the request realization of L2 speakers of English and aims to give an account of mainly three aspects related to that topic: Which strategy the participants in this study most commonly use, if (and how) social context might affect how the L2 speakers perform requests and how the social context affect whether the participants choose to perform the request using the unmarked or the remote modal. In order to investigate this, three research questions were formulated: 1) Which strategies do Norwegian learners of English prefer when performing requests? 2) How sensitive do they seem to be to the social factors of the context? 3) How does this seem to affect their choice of modals when making requests? The participants in this study are teenagers (aged 16-17) who all had Norwegian as their L1 and English as their L2. The data was elicited by distributing a questionnaire consisting of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and two multiple-choice tests. The Results show that there is a slight discrepancy between the strategies the participants use in their answers to the DCT and the one they choose in the multiple choice test: the request strategies the participants use in the multiple-choice test vary to a greater extent compared to the strategies they use in the DCT. The answers to the test eliciting which form of the modal auxiliary the participants prefer and how sensitive they seem to be to the social context showed that the participants chooses the remote modal when the social distance was great or the power was with the addressee.