A pragmatic analysis of l2 spanish reque

Intercultural Pragmatics 2017; 14(3): 391–419 Lori Czerwionka* and Alejandro Cuza A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests: Acquisition in three situational contexts during short-term study abroad DOI 10.1515/ip-2017-0016 Abstract: This study examines pragmatic acquisition of requests for Englishspeaking learners of Spanish This research expands upon previous work by investigating the acquisition of second language requests during a short-term immersion program (6 weeks) in Madrid, Spain and in three situational contexts: food and drink, general merchandise, and familial Data were collected using an experimental computerized oral discourse completion task Requests made by learners (501 requests) and native speakers (224 requests) were compared considering personal deictic orientation and directness of the requests For learners, shifts from speaker-oriented to hearer-oriented requests indicated greater pragmatic development in food and drink and familial contexts Results are discussed considering pragmatic developmental stages and differential results in the three contexts Keywords: request, speech act, second language acquisition of pragmatics, study abroad, situational variation Introduction Pragmatic competence is essential to second language learners, especially in contexts where their second language is the primary language of use, as in the case of study abroad Pragmatic competence encompasses the knowledge of pragmalinguistic resources and sociopragmatic application of those resources to second language contexts (Barron 2003) “Pragmalinguistics deals with the linguistic resources of a language which can be employed to serve a specific communicative function, e.g the syntactic patterns which can be used to perform a particular speech act in a given language *Corresponding author: Lori Czerwionka, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, E-mail: czerwionka@purdue.edu Alejandro Cuza, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, E-mail: acuza@purdue.edu 392 L Czerwionka and A Cuza Sociopragmatics, on the other hand, examines the social circumstances under which a particular speech act can be performed Thus, pragmalinguistic studies are language-specific, while sociopragmatic studies are culture-specific (cf Leech 1983: 10–13)“ (Schneider 2014: 114) Learners are faced with a challenge when their first and second languages use different linguistic resources to perform a given speech act in particular social circumstances, as in the case of requests in English and Spanish English tends to rely more on speaker-oriented, indirect requests like Could I have some water?; Spanish tends to use more hearer-oriented, direct requests like Pásame el agua ‘Pass me the water’ (Ballesteros Martín 2001; Callahan 2011; Cenoz and Valencia 1996; Félix-Brasdefer 2015; Fox and Heinemann 2016; Le Pair 1996; Márquez Reiter 2000; Márquez Reiter 2002; Pinto 2005; Pinto and Raschio 2007; Placencia 2005; Shively 2011; Shively and Cohen 2008).1 Research on second language request acquisition during immersion programs abroad has provided varied findings There is evidence that Englishspeaking learners of Spanish shift to more Spanish-like, hearer-oriented requests over a period abroad (Czerwionka and Cuza 2017; Shively 2011), yet counter evidence often from specific request scenarios is also available (Bataller 2010; Hernández 2016; Shively and Cohen 2008) Mixed results on the impact of study abroad exist when examining semester-long programs abroad (Bataller 2010; Shively 2011) and also short-term programs (Czerwionka and Cuza 2017; Hernández 2016) Furthermore, few studies have systematically examined the impact of different situational contexts, with most focusing on service industry encounters (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer 2015) Therefore, the goal of the present study is to investigate the acquisition of requests among English-speaking learners of Spanish during a short-term, 6-week program abroad in Madrid, Spain in three controlled situational contexts A short-term program was selected considering that the majority of U.S students study abroad in short-term programs (Institute of International Education n.d.) and that 57 % language learners who study abroad so in short-term programs (Allen and Dupuy 2013: 471) It is particularly relevant to examine the educational outcomes of short-term programs in search for evidence to support the claim that “[e]ven shorter lengths of stay might help learners become more targetlike, particularly with respect to highly salient conversational functions” (Bardovi-Harlig 1999: 685), as may be the case with requests Speaker-oriented requests contain first person-reference and hearer-oriented contain secondperson reference A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 393 Speech acts Speech acts have been studied in a variety of different sociocultural contexts, including linguistically and geographically distinct contexts within the Spanishspeaking world (Félix-Brasdefer 2005; Félix-Brasdefer 2009; Félix-Brasdefer 2010; Márquez Reiter 2002; Márquez Reiter 2005; Méndez Vallejo 2013; Placencia 1998; Placencia 2005; Ruzickova 2007; Stapleton 2004) Comparative studies have addressed questions related to cross-linguistic communication (Barron 2005; Blum-Kulka et al 1989; Márquez Reiter et al 2005; Marti 2006), including comparisons of English and Spanish (Ballesteros Martín 2001; Ballesteros Martín 2002; Bou Franch and Lorenzo-Dus 2008; Callahan 2011; Koike 1994; Márquez Reiter 1997; Pinto 2010; Pinto and Raschio 2007) Prior research has also addressed speech acts as they vary according to particular situations (Bataller 2010; Cenoz and Valencia 1996; Félix-Brasdefer 2004) and local situational factors such as social distance and power (Blum-Kulka et al 1989; Brown and Levinson 1987; Félix-Brasdefer 2004) Speech acts provide insight into the interactional norms and expectations of a given community, examined often through the lens of politeness theories Brown and Levinson (1987) initially proposed a universal understanding of politeness, but further investigation in diverse sociocultural communities led to criticisms of ethnocentricism (Bravo 2002; HernándezFlores 2004; Matsumoto 1989; Pizziconi 2003) For the current purposes, politeness is understood as “a form of social interaction that is conditioned by the sociocultural norms of a particular society” (Félix-Brasdefer 2006: 2159) “[L]inguistic structures not in themselves denote politeness” (Watts 2003: 168), rather “types of social interaction are sanctioned not only by ourselves as individuals but by society as a whole” (143) In light of this understanding of politeness, second language requests over a short-term program abroad in Spain provide insight into American learners’ adoption of social interactions (i.e., requests) sanctioned by the local, Spanish society 2.1 Requests in Spanish and English Requests express a desire that attempts to make the hearer take action; they may range in illocutionary force, depending on the linguistic features used to make the request (e.g., direct imperative forms to indirect hints) (Bach 2003; Blum-Kulka et al 1989; Searle 1976) In Spanish and English, requests differ most saliently with respect to their personal deictic orientation and directness (Table 1) 394 L Czerwionka and A Cuza Table 1: Examples of requests by orientation and directness in Spanish and English Hearer-oriented Speaker-oriented Ambiguous Direct Imperative Ponme una cerveza ‘Give me a beer.’ Declarative I want a beer ‘Quiero una cerveza’ Verbal Ellipsis Una cerveza ‘A beer.’ Conventionally indirect Interrogative (Hearer –oriented) Interrogative (Speakeroriented) ¿ Me pones una ensalada? Can I have a salad? ‘Can you get me a salad?’ # i¿ Pue tener una ensalada? i This request form is felicitous in English and infelicitous in Spanish as indicated by # With respect to deictic orientation, requests in Peninsular Spanish are commonly hearer-oriented (i.e., second-person reference, ¿Me traes un café? ‘Will you bring me a coffee?) and ambiguously-oriented—when no verb is used to make the request (e.g., verbal ellipsis, un café por favor ‘a coffee please’) (Marquez Reiter 2000; 2002; Pinto 2005; Placencia 2005; Shively 2011; Shively and Cohen 2008) American English speakers typically rely on speaker-oriented requests (i.e., first-person reference – I’d like a coffee) (Fox and Heinneman 2016; Pinto and Raschio 2007) With respect to directness, indicated with clause type in this study, Peninsular Spanish requests are overwhelmingly direct, at least in food and drink contexts (Placencia 2005) Placencia (2005) indicated that native speakers of Spanish rely on imperative clauses and verbal ellipsis most often Spanish speakers have broadly been found to use more direct requests than English speakers (Ballesteros Martín 2001; Callahan 2011; FélixBrasdefer 2015; Márquez-Reiter 1997) Spaniards have also been shown to rely on hearer-oriented, conventionally indirect requests, in the form of heareroriented interrogatives (Bataller 2010; Cenoz and Valencia 1996; Le Pair 1996) Spanish requests are quite formulaic across the peninsula (Stapleton 2004), and use of hearer-oriented interrogatives, imperatives, and verbal ellipsis are common request strategies in Peninsular Spanish In comparison to Spanish requests, English-speaking Americans use a broader range of requests from direct imperatives to indirect preparatory directives (e.g., Do you have coffee?) to permission directives (e.g., May I … ) (Ervin-Tripp 1976) Two of the most common request forms in English are speaker-oriented “want/need-declaratives and can-interrogatives” (Fox and Heinemann 2016: 499) Pinto and Raschio (2007) found can-interrogatives, also called permission directives, to be common in English and uncommon in Spanish A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 395 2.2 Requests of English-speaking second language learners of Spanish in immersion settings The differences between Spanish and English request forms have the potential to beget transfer from first language norms to second language requests, leading to requests in the second language that are infelicitous in the local community The study of second language learners’ requests in Spanish highlight learners’ usage tendencies and acquisition of pragmatic norms (Alcón-Soler 2015; Bataller 2010; Félix-Brasdefer 2004; Félix-Brasdefer 2007; González-Cruz 2014; Hernández 2016; Le Pair 1996; Pinto 2005; Shively 2011) In the study abroad context of Spain, some research indicates that learners adjust their request strategies during immersion programs to approximate native speaker populations (Czerwionka and Cuza 2017; Shively 2011) Yet Shively and Cohen (2008) found mixed results depending on individual situational scenarios, and Hernández (2016) found that learners maintained a preference for speaker-oriented requests over a short-term program abroad Even comparing the two prior studies of English-speaking learners of Spanish over short-term programs abroad, there were divergent findings (Czerwionka and Cuza 2017; Hernández 2016) Analyses of requests during study abroad in the Peninsular Spanish context have tended to focus on service-industry contexts in which food or drinks are exchanged (Bataller 2010; Czerwionka and Cuza 2017; Shively 2011) In food and drink contexts specifically, there is evidence that English-speaking learners of Spanish in Spain shift away from speaker-oriented requests over the period abroad Shively (2011) demonstrated this trend for learners over a semester abroad, finding a decrease in the dependence on speaker-oriented requests and an increase in ambiguously-oriented requests Czerwionka and Cuza (2017) found a decrease in speaker-oriented requests in favor of hearer-oriented requests in food and drink scenarios over a 6-week, short-term program abroad Thus, similar request development was found after a semester-long and 6-week program, and pragmatic intervention does not seem to be required to provoke this pragmatic development as evidenced in the 6-week program data Conversely, Bataller (2010) found distinct trends for a coffee request scenario (Bataller 2010) In a reanalysis of the Bataller (2010) data to examine the personal deictic orientation of requests, the learners used speaker-oriented requests for coffee most often at the beginning and end of the semester using declarative want-statements (I want … ‘Quiero … ’), need statements (I need … ‘Necesito … ’), and query permission interrogative requests (Can I have … ‘¿Puedo tener … ?2) This structure is pragmatically inappropriate in Spanish 396 L Czerwionka and A Cuza While focusing on food and drink contexts, other contexts have also been addressed Bataller (2010) analyzed requests in a shoe exchange scenario, in which learners relied on speaker-oriented requests 84.6 % of the time at the beginning of the semester and 81.3 % at the end Hearer-oriented request usage increased from % to 6.3 % over the semester Thus, in her study, learners experienced small shifts towards the use of hearer-oriented requests, but overall maintained a strong reliance on speaker-oriented requests independent of the context Hernández (2016) analyzed the deictic orientation of requests in five situations (i.e., Request of slower speech, airplane seat, paper extension, less food, leaving school—originally used in Shively and Cohen 2008) He found a learner preference for speaker-oriented requests at the beginning and end of a short-term program Considering the prior research collectively, the mixed findings prompt consideration of the impact of the social contexts of requests and methodological approaches Regarding social contexts, it is questioned whether learners are more apt to adopt hearer-oriented requests in food and drink situations compared to others There is little evidence to support this hypothesis, partially due to the fact that in investigations that have addressed a variety of contexts, often the variables considered have been unbalanced, making it difficult to make comparisons (cf Ballesteros Martín 2001) For example, in the scenarios provided by Shively and Cohen (2008) and used by Hernández (2016), relative social status, social distance, and imposition were considered, but their representation was not balanced For relative status of the hearer, three scenarios included a higher status listener, one was of equal or higher status, and one was of lower status This type of imbalance makes it difficult to understand how these variables impact the request norms This same issue has been observed regarding the analysis of social contexts (e.g., university setting, familial) Thus, to investigate the impact of the social context (e.g., food and drink, general merchandise, familial) on learners’ requests, sufficient data and a balanced design are imperative The mixed findings in prior investigations of learners’ request development may also potentially be explained by the impact of the methodological approach Maintenance of speaker-oriented, English-like, requests was found most often using a written discourse completion task (DCT) (Bataller 2010; Hernández 2016) Shifts from speaker- to hearer-oriented requests—becoming more Spanish-like—were found in studies that relied on naturally-occurring data (Shively 2011) and a computerized oral DCT (Czerwionka and Cuza 2017) While data elicitation methods could have had an effect (Golato 2003), Bataller and Shively (2011) indicated more similarities between elicited and naturally-occurring data than differences (see also Félix-Brasdefer 2003) A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 397 Supporting the limited impact of elicitation method is the fact that both Shively (2011) and Czerwionka and Cuza (2017) found similar shifts from speaker- to hearer-oriented requests using different methods Thus, it is unclear that methodological effects have had a primary role in producing distinct results related to learner request development, and there is evidence for similar pragmatic development analyzed via computerized oral DCTs and spontaneous data In summary, students can make progress towards hearer-oriented requests during a period abroad in Spain, at least in food and drink scenarios (Czerwionka and Cuza 2017; Shively 2011) It is less clear whether learners experience a shift from speaker- to hearer-oriented requests in other situations (e.g., Bataller 2010; Hernández 2016) Therefore, the current study examined learner requests in food and drink, general merchandise, and familial situations during a short-term immersion program in Spain, using the same methodology as Czerwionka and Cuza (2017) to provide comparative data The rationale for these particular contexts is addressed in Section This study provides insight into second language acquisition of requests during short-term programs abroad and examines the impact of three situational contexts The current study The goal of this investigation is to examine the second language acquisition of requests by English-speaking learners of Spanish during a short-term immersion program in Madrid, Spain The current investigation expands upon prior research to consider request acquisition in three situational contexts: (1) service encounter contexts of food and drink retailers, (2) service encounter contexts in which general merchandise or services are exchanged, and (3) familial contexts in which food and drink objects are exchanged between family members These are referred to as food and drink, general merchandise, and familial contexts These three contexts have been approached in prior literature on requests in study abroad settings (Shively 2011; Bataller 2010; Shively and Cohen 2008), indicating that they are common interactions for learners abroad Learners identify service encounters and family interactions as common contexts in which learning occurs during study abroad programs (Misfeldt and Plews 2017), again indicating that experiences in these contexts are frequent for learners We include food and drink and general merchandise as distinct types of service encounters, since it is assumed that food and drink interactions are more common for learners as food and drink are part of daily events that occur multiple times per day Requesting other items in service encounters (e.g., shoes, movie tickets, stamps) likely occurs less frequently, 398 L Czerwionka and A Cuza but students in the program studied mentioned having these types of interactions as well Family contexts were included because the students in this program indicated on questionnaires that they spent large amounts of time with host families Per week, students reported spending an average of 5.8 hours going out for food or drink (SD = 5.6), 16.0 hours doing tourist activities and shopping which may include general merchandise encounters (SD = 9.9), and 16.8 hours doing activities with their host families (SD = 12.6) The following research questions guided the analyses, with research question addressing learners’ development over time and research question addressing the comparison of learners and native speakers of Peninsular Spanish The research questions are applied first to the analysis of request orientation (i.e., hearer-, speaker-, and ambiguously-oriented requests) and then to request directness (i.e., direct and conventionally indirect requests) Research question 1: Do the request strategies of English-speaking learners of Spanish change over the immersion program in food and drink, general merchandise, and familial contexts? Research question 2: Do learners’ request strategies become more felicitous over the period abroad in food and drink, general merchandise, and familial contexts considering Peninsular Spanish norms? Regarding hypotheses for research question for request orientation, we expect learners’ requests to change over the period abroad considering the increased exposure to Peninsular request norms in food and drink, general merchandise, and familial contexts Based on prior research on food and drink contexts, a shift away from speaker-oriented requests is expected We hypothesize that learners will exhibit a similar shift in all three contexts The hypotheses related to research question for request orientation are that learners will develop more felicitous requests over the period abroad, thus exhibiting significant differences from native speakers at the beginning of the program and no significant differences at the end of the program While prior research has indicated this trend in food and drink contexts, the development of felicitous requests is expected in all contexts For research question and request directness, it is hypothesized that learners in this program will use more direct requests over time in all contexts considering that Czerwionka and Cuza (2017) found a learner shift towards directness, at least in Spanish food and drink contexts Contrary to Czerwionka and Cuza’s (2017) finding, Félix-Brasdefer’s (2007) examination of university level Spanish learners at four different levels in an American university setting indicated that learners used more indirect requests over the four years, A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 399 identifying a trend that followed the developmental stages proposed by Kasper and Rose (2002) For the current hypothesis we rely on the Czerwionka and Cuza (2017) data that better represent the student population, educational program, and Spanish variety under consideration in this paper For research question related to directness, we predict that learners’ requests will diverge from native speakers’ request norms at the beginning of the program and that learners will develop more felicitous requests over the period abroad, thus exhibiting requests that align with native speakers’ requests at the end of the program This hypothesis stands for all three contexts 3.1 Participants and immersion context Seventeen (n = 17) English-speaking learners of Spanish and fifteen (n = 15) native speakers of Peninsular Spanish participated in the study The second language (L2) learners (mean age = 21.2, SD = 2.0) were undergraduate students at a large American university in the Midwest All learners were enrolled in a study abroad program in Madrid, Spain, the criteria that determined the sample size of this population They were majors or minors in Spanish, and they had all taken a fifth semester Spanish course or beyond when starting the program Learners responded to a survey about their Spanish language use during the program (Cuza 2013) The learners lived with host families in Madrid, and they reported using Spanish during an average of 52.5 hours per week (SD = 35.6) Of this time, 37 % represented time using Spanish with their host families Per the program requirements, students had at least two meals per day with their host families In response to a separate question and as stated in Section above, learners estimated spending 16.8 hours per week doing activities with their host families (SD = 12.6), 5.8 hours per week going out for food or drink (SD = 5.6), and 16.0 hours per week doing tourist activities and shopping (SD = 9.9) They took two university courses, selecting from a sixth semester Spanish language course, an advanced culture course on current events and policies in Spain, and an advanced art class that included weekly visits to the Prado museum None of the courses included pragmatics or requests as specific course topics The sixth semester Spanish course addressed the past subjunctive and conditional forms, yet no specific attention was paid to the possibility of using these structures for requests Learners also participated in excursions organized by the program and explored Madrid during their free time The Spanish native speaking (NS) participants were from Madrid, Spain (mean age = 23.93, SD = 6.7) They all had university education or were university students at time of testing 400 L Czerwionka and A Cuza 3.2 Procedures and instruments Learners completed a computerized oral discourse completion task at the beginning and end of the program, within three days of the beginning and end of the 6-week program.3 The same task was used at both times with the exception of a different randomized order of test items The native speakers of Spanish completed the same production task once during the program There were fifteen test items and seven distractors Five test items represented the food and drink context, five represented the general merchandise context, and five represented the familial context (Table 2) By eliciting five repetitions within each context from each participant, this design provided 510 learner and 225 native speaker requests for analysis Nine learner responses and one native speaker response were not included in the analysis due to lack of response, absence of a request, or missing data in one case The resulting learner (501) and native speaker (224) requests offered a satisfactory number of tokens per participant per context for analysis The distractor items related to speech acts other than requests Table 2: Requested items and addressee by context Requested items Food and Drink coffee, tea, wine, beer, salad General movie ticket, phone card, shoe store, tobacco Merchandise store, location in city Familial orange juice, beer, water coffee, onion Addressee servers in food and drink establishments customer service agents family member During the task, participants heard a preamble and saw a photo of the scenario, collectively functioning to frame the request in the food and drink, general merchandise, or familial context Following a prompt, which indicated the addressee, participants made a request (Example 1) All requests were audio recorded Example Oral discourse completion task text Preamble: Rosa está en una cafetería y quiere pedir una ensalada mixta ‘Rosa is in a cafeteria and wants to order a salad.’ For other elicited production tasks, see Cuza (2013), Czerwionka (2010), Félix-Brasdefer (2007), or Schauer (2004) A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 405 use, but learners approached appropriate usage in food and drink contexts by the end of the program 4.2 Request directness As a more detailed analysis, the directness of requests was examined Four clause types were examined Imperatives and hearer-oriented interrogatives (Interrogative-H) were the two types of hearer-oriented clauses; Speaker-oriented interrogatives (Interrogative-S) and declaratives were the two speaker-oriented clause types Examples of these clause types can be found in Section The descriptive data for all groups (Figure 2) show that learners increased their use of imperatives over the program, which did not pattern after the NS use in this study The NS group relied on imperatives most often in the familial context Learners maintained low uses of hearer-oriented interrogatives over the program, while hearer-oriented interrogatives were the most common type of request used by native speakers in each context For the speaker-oriented clause types, there was infrequent use of speaker-oriented interrogatives for all groups in all contexts Regarding declarative requests, the learners reduced their usage of declarative requests over the program, shifting towards the NS usage in food and drink, general merchandise, and familial contexts Figure 2: Descriptive data for request clause type for L2-pre, L2-post, and NS Comparing learners’ requests over the program (Table 5), results indicated that learners significantly increased the use of imperative requests over the program in the three contexts No significant change was found with the use of hearer-oriented interrogatives Thus, the increase in hearer-oriented requests (Section 4.1) may be attributed to the increase in imperative requests For speaker-oriented requests, learners significantly decreased the use of 406 L Czerwionka and A Cuza Table 5: Clause type: Pragmalinguistic group analyses (L2-pre vs L2-post linear models and Tukey-Krammer comparisons) L-pre M (SD) L-post M (SD) Imperativei Food and Drink General Merchandise Familial . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) Interrogative-Hii Food and Drink General Merchandise Familial . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) Interrogative-Siii Food and Drink General Merchandise Familial . (.) . (.) . (.) Declarativeiv Food and Drink General Merchandise Familial . (.) . (.) . (.) Statistical report Sig F(, ) = ., F(, ) = ., F(, ) = ., F(, ) = ., p =  p = . p = . p = . ) = , ) = , ) = , ) = , p = . p = . p = . p = . F(, ) = ., F(, ) = , F(, ) = ., F(, ) = ., p = . p = . p = . p = . * . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) F(, F(, F(, F(, ) = ., ) = ., ) = ., ) = ., p =  p = . p = . p = . ** * F(, F(, F(, F(, *** ** * * speaker-oriented interrogative clauses over the program; the trend was similar for all contexts Finally, learners decreased the use of declarative clauses over the program in all three contexts; the reduction represented a significant difference only in the food and drink context All group results comparing request directness of learners to native speakers are presented in Table For imperatives, no significant difference between the L2-pre and NS group was found At the end of the program, the learners relied on imperatives significantly more than NS in food and drink and general merchandise contexts Learners used hearer-oriented interrogatives significantly less often than native speakers in the three contexts at the beginning and end of the program These findings related to hearer-oriented clause types will be discussed in Section With respect to the speaker-oriented interrogatives, learners used them significantly more than NS in the familial context at the beginning of the program, and the trend was similar for the other two contexts At the end of the program, the data were insufficient for the model to converge as both groups seldom used speaker-oriented interrogatives—A positive finding for learners, as speaker-oriented interrogative requests are commonly used in English but not in Spanish Finally, learners used declarative Interrogative-Sv Food and drink General Merchandise Familiar Declarativevi vii Food and drink General Merchandise Familiar Interrogative-Hiii Food and drink General Merchandise Familiar Imperativei ii Food and drink General Merchandise Familiar iv . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) F(, ) = ., p <  *** ** *** ** *** F(, ) = ., p <  F(, ) = ., p = . F(, ) = ., p = . F(, ) = ., p =  F(, ) = ., p <  F(, ) = ., p =  F(, ) = ., p <  *** *** F(, ) = ., p =  . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) *** *** *** F(, ) = , p = . F(, ) = ., p <  F(, ) = ., p <  F(, ) = ., p <  . (.) . (.) . (.) NNSpost M (SD)  (.) Sig F(, ) = ., p = . F(, ) = ., p = . F(, ) = ., p = . Statistical report . (.) . (.) NS M (SD) . (.) . (.) NNSpre M (SD) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) F(, ) = ., p = . F(, ) = ., p =  F(, ) = , p = . F(, ) = ., p = . . (.) . (.) . (.) F(, ) = ., p =  . (.) . (.) F(, ) = ., p = . F(, ) = ., p <  F(, ) = ., p <  F(, ) = ., p = . Statistical report F(, ) = ., p <  F(, ) = ., p <  F(, ) = ., p <  . (.) . (.) . (.) NS M (SD) Table 6: Clause type: Sociopragmatic group analyses (L2-pre vs NS and L2-post vs NS linear models and Tukey-Krammer comparisons) * ** ** ** *** *** *** *** *** * Sig A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 407 408 L Czerwionka and A Cuza requests significantly more than NS in all contexts at the beginning of the program, but not at the end Summary of findings In this investigation, we hypothesized that learners’ requests would change over time, the use of speaker-oriented requests, which are more common in English than Spanish, would decrease over time, and that these changes would be similar in all three situational contexts The results confirmed that learners’ requests changed over time and that learners used fewer speaker-oriented requests and more hearer-oriented requests over the program Examples 2–8 represent typical speaker-oriented requests used by learners at the beginning of the program These types of requests were reduced over time The overall reduction in speaker-oriented requests mirrors findings in prior research about food and drink requests during immersion programs (Czerwionka and Cuza 2017; Shively 2011) Examples 2–8 Speaker-oriented requests: L2-pre tendency Queremos café Food and Drink ‘We want coffee’ Yo quiero ensalada mixta Food and Drink ‘I want a salad’ Me gustaría la ensalada mixta por favor Food and Drink ‘I would like a salad please’ Quiero pedir una cerveza por favor Food and Drink ‘I want to ask for a beer please.’ Necesito una cebolla Familial ‘I need an onion’ Quiero zumo de naranja Familial ‘I want an orange juice’ Necesito comprar una tarjeta prepagada General Merchandise ‘I need to buy a prepaid card’ Considering the three contexts, a significant increase in learners’ use of heareroriented requests was found in food and drink and familial contexts, along with a significant decrease in speaker-oriented requests in the familial context Typical hearer-oriented requests produced by learners at the end of the program in food and drink and familial contexts were quite uniform in structure, with more uses of imperatives than other types of requests in these contexts (see A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 409 Figure 2, Examples 9–14).5 The hypothesis that the shift to hearer-oriented requests would be the same in all three contexts was not confirmed, yet positive developments were identified Examples 9–15 Hearer-oriented requests: L2-post tendency 10 11 12 13 14 15 Ponme un café ‘Give me a coffee’ Dame una ensalada mixta ‘Give me a salad’ Ponme una cerveza por favor ‘Give me a beer please’ Tráeme un café por favor ‘Bring me a coffee please’ Pásame la cebolla por favor ‘Pass me the onion please’ Por favor pásame una cerveza ‘Please pass me a beer’ ¿Podrías darme un zumo de naranja? ‘Could you give me an orange juice’? Food and Drink Food and Drink Food and Drink Familial Familial Familial Familial We also hypothesized that learners’ request orientations would be different from native speakers’ requests at the beginning of the program and become more like the native speakers’ requests over the period abroad Findings confirmed this hypothesis considering the use of speaker-oriented requests in food and drink contexts and hearer-oriented requests in the food and drink and general merchandise contexts Taken jointly, we confirm that learners’ requests were more similar to native speakers’ request considering orientation at the end of the program, especially in the food and drink context While development was not the same in all contexts, learners’ requests shifted towards native speaker request orientation norms in all three contexts For the analysis of directness, we expected a change over the period for learners in all three contexts Within hearer-oriented requests, learners significantly increased their use of imperatives (Examples 9–14) and maintained a low use of hearer-oriented interrogatives in the three contexts over the program with more reliance on these in the familial context (Example 15) Within the speakeroriented requests, learners seldom used speaker-oriented interrogatives (e.g., ¿Puedo tener un café? ‘Can I have a coffee’?), a positive finding given the The verb poner ‘to put’ is used in Peninsular Spanish requests to mean ‘to give’ or ‘to get’ 410 L Czerwionka and A Cuza pragmatic inappropriateness in Spanish Also related to speaker-oriented requests, learners decreased the use of declarative requests over time, which are clause types commonly used for English requests The decrease represented a significant difference in only the food and drink context Examples 2–8 represent declarative requests that were relied on more at the beginning of the program than at the end With these findings, we confirm that change occurred over the program from speaker- to hearer-oriented requests, and that the change resulted primarily from a shift from declarative requests to imperative requests This change can be seen most obviously in the food and drink and familial contexts (see Figures and 2) Comparing request directness of learners and native speakers, it was hypothesized that learners’ requests would be different from native speakers’ requests at the beginning of the program and become more like the native speakers’ requests over the period abroad At the end of the program, learners used imperatives similarly to native speakers in the familial context but not in the food and drink or general merchandise contexts Results showed different uses of hearer-oriented interrogatives by learners and native speakers in all three contexts at the beginning and end of the program Native speakers indicated a strong reliance on hearer-oriented interrogatives (Examples 16–20); most often they did not include an auxiliary verb (Examples 17–19) Hearer-oriented interrogative requests: Native speaker tendency 16 ¿Nos puedes poner un café por favor? Food and Drink ‘Can you bring us a coffee please’? 17 ¿Me pones dos cervezas? Food and Drink ‘Can you bring me two beers’? 18 ¿Tiene tarjetas prepago? General Merchandise ‘Do you have prepaid cards’? 19 ¿Me traes un café por favor? Familial ‘Can you bring me a coffee please’? 20 ¿Me puedes pasar un poco de agua por favor? Familial ‘Can you pass me a little water please’? While results indicated differences in the use of imperatives and hearer-oriented interrogatives for learners and native speaker in most contexts, it should be noted that prior literature has shown that imperative requests are the pragmatic norm in various Spanish-speaking communities, including Spain (Placencia 2005; Shively 2011) On the other hand, prior work has also indicated a native speaker reliance on hearer-oriented interrogative requests (Bataller 2010; Cenoz and Valencia 1996; A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 411 Le Pair 1996), and so future work may consider delving deeper into the contextual constraints on imperative and hearer-oriented interrogative requests A final explanation is that the diverging results regarding Peninsular native speakers’ use of imperative or hearer-oriented interrogatives may have resulted from a methodological effect as the investigations that show reliance on hearer-oriented interrogatives examined discourse completion task data Various researchers have compared experimental and naturalistic data collection methods finding similarities and differences between the data types (Bou Franch and Lorenzo-Dus 2008; Félix-Brasdefer 2003; Golato 2003; Bataller and Shively 2011) Independent of this discussion related to directness, for the learners in this study, we consider the general shift from speaker-oriented to hearer-oriented requests to be an indicator of development This finding can be explained by the shift from speaker-oriented, declarative requests to hearer-oriented, imperative requests over the program Looking back to Figure 2, this shift can be seen most saliently in food and drink and familial contexts Discussion 6.1 Pragmatic developmental stages Learners broadly followed the trajectory of development from speaker- to hearer-oriented requests, but they also maintained the use of direct requests as they shifted from declarative to imperative requests.6 Given the maintenance of direct requests by learners, the current data not seem to support pragmatic developmental stages from direct to indirect requests as indicated by Kasper and Rose (2002) and Félix-Brasdefer (2007) FélixBrasdefer (2007) analyzed American learners of Spanish in a universitylevel, foreign language setting, and thus the findings seem to represent a pragmalinguistic developmental trajectory that aligns with the learning of Spanish grammatical structures and increased vocabulary in a classroom setting Kasper and Rose (2002) base their stages on learners of English, a language in which indirectness is a more common request strategy compared to Peninsular Spanish norms While the current data seem to suggest a different developmental path for learners of Spanish in immersion settings, three other interpretations of the We consider the learners’ imperative requests to align with Peninsular Spanish norms, as evidenced in prior research (Placencia 2005) 412 L Czerwionka and A Cuza relationship between the current findings and previously described developmental stages are considered First, within the previously described developmental stages, it is possible that the current learners were in the formulaic stage, which is stage two of four for Félix-Brasdefer (2007) and two of five for Kasper and Rose (2002), given that they relied heavily on formulaic language, like imperatives, for making requests While this proposal is possible, it is unlikely that the current learners were at this stage considering that learners at this stage are often not able to grammatically analyze the forms used (Bardovi-Harlig 2006; Félix-Brasdefer 2007); The current students were beyond 6th semester university courses and thus had metalinguistic abilities to analyze imperative forms Another potential explanation is that the learners were at the final stage identified by Kasper and Rose (2002), the “fine-tuning” stage, in which learners modulate the illocutionary force according to given contexts If the current students’ requests represented a “fine-tuning” stage, we would expect to have more examples of requests that exemplified individual learners who were at earlier stages of development, but this was not the case Thus, there is little evidence that learners are at a final stage of pragmatic development The third proposal is that the fine-tuning stage is not always the final stage If sufficient context-dependent input is available to learners and if the pragmatically appropriate linguistic strategies are quite uniform within or across contexts, then learners at a variety of levels will be able to develop pragmatically appropriate requests that are fine-tuned to a context without necessarily progressing through all of the typical developmental stages This may be the situation of request development during study abroad in Spain, and additional data from learners at diverse levels may be useful in providing further support While questions remain about the current learners’ stage of development and the relevance of developmental trajectories in certain contexts of pragmatic learning, the current data indicate that pragmatic development is an outcome that can be achieved by students in short-term language immersion programs like the one examined, as demonstrated by a shift from speaker- to heareroriented requests (c.f Hernández 2016) 6.2 Second language acquisition of requests in three situational contexts While most research on second language request development during immersion programs in Spain has examined food and drink contexts, the current findings demonstrate a clear need for a more fine-grained approach that A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 413 considers not only pragmatic gains, but the potential for differential gains across different situational contexts Prior research has attempted to address situational variation (e.g., Bataller 2010; Félix-Brasdefer 2004; Shively and Cohen 2008; Hernández 2016), but this type of investigation often has lacked balanced data or the situations were not easily comparable with one another The current approach aimed to improve upon prior research by collecting various requests from each participant in each situational context, and also by controlling the stimuli within each situational context for comparative purposes Comparing the three contexts, learners achieved appropriate requests, as measured by comparing learners with native speakers, more often in food and drink contexts than either general merchandise or familial contexts In an attempt to explain this finding, we consider learners’ experiences in each context and the nature of the situational contexts more generally We propose that learners achieve more appropriate requests in food and drink contexts because they interact often in these contexts Shively’s (2011) examination of naturally-occurring service interactions provides some evidence of the frequency of learners’ participation in food and drink interactions during immersion programs During the 6-week program under examination, students often purchased coffee, pastries, tortilla española ‘Spanish omelet’, and other snacks during the daily break times at the university and went to restaurants and bars for food and drink in the evenings General merchandise encounters seem less frequent considering the fact that exchange of other items, not food or drink, is a less central activity to life in general and thus less central in the learners’ lives during the immersion program Concerning the nature of the contexts themselves, food and drink encounters are more uniform than general merchandise encounters in that they are limited to the request of food or drink, whereas general merchandise encounters involve the request of a variety of goods This variation may cause learners difficulty when they attempt to observe and produce appropriate requests For the familial context, learners achieved appropriate requests less often than in the food and drink context according to statistical analysis comparing learners to native speakers, but they exhibited significant changes in their requests in the familial context over time Perhaps contributing to why learners were found to perform distinctly from native speakers in the familial context at the end of the program is the fact that native speakers used hearer-oriented requests 100 % of the time in familial contexts This native speaker trend also highlights the potential for consistent request input received by learners in host-family settings These findings point towards a benefit of living with host families and call for future work to confirm these findings through the analysis of spontaneous data 414 L Czerwionka and A Cuza In an applied sense, the current results point to the need for learners to be more prepared to interact in all contexts Learners should be encouraged to examine native speakers’ requests in a variety of situational contexts, consider how different purposes and relationships impact request performance, and then practice requests (specifically hearer-oriented requests for learners of Peninsular Spanish) in these contexts to be prepared to produce appropriate requests Continued examination of learners’ experiences and opportunities for language input and learning during programs abroad is also necessary, a suggestion that has previously been recommended (e.g., Kinginger 2008; Lafford 2006) 6.3 Limitations While offering an analysis of request acquisition in three contexts during short-term study abroad, limitations remain and promote ideas for future work First, while the experimental design offers benefits, naturalistic data would offer complementary information about second language request acquisition and use Secondly, while no intervention was included in this design, it is possible that the pre-test may have oriented students to requests and thus facilitated their acquisition process Finally, as suggested above, future work would benefit from collecting data on the quality and quantity of specific types of interactions For example data that report students’ request opportunities and request observations related to food and drink, general merchandise, and familial contexts could be useful in providing detail to understand the acquisition process and learning environment better Conclusion This study contributed an analysis of request acquisition among English-speaking learners of Spanish during a short-term immersion program in Madrid, Spain, considering pragmatic development in three situational contexts (i.e., food and drink, general merchandise, familial) A main contribution of this study includes the finding that pragmatic development with respect to request acquisition can occur during short-term, 6-week language immersion programs in the absence of pragmatic intervention This is particularly important given the popularity of short-term programs among students who study abroad (Allen and Dupuy 2013; The Institute of International Education n.d.) Previous research has indicated that acquisition of pragmatic abilities is associated with length of residence in a place where the second language is spoken (Blum-Kulka and A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests 415 Olshtain 1986; Félix-Brasdefer 2004) and that “learners generally adopt some of the pragmatic norms of the host country over the course of their sojourn abroad, often becoming more target-like pragmatically after four to nine months in the host country (cf Barron 2003; Bataller 2008; Churchill and DuFon 2006; Cohen and Shively 2007; Félix-Brasdefer 2004; Schauer 2008)” (Shively 2011: 1821) Conversely, the current findings of pragmatic development over a 6-week program support the prediction that “shorter lengths of stay might help learners become more targetlike, particularly with respect to highly salient conversational functions” (Bardovi-Harlig 1999: 685) The current results demonstrated differential development considering the three contexts, with increased 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Spanish requests 401 Ahora viene el camarero y Rosa le dice … ‘The waiter is coming and and Rosa says to him … ’ Sample Request: Para mí, una ensalada mixta ‘For me, a salad’ Prompt: 3.3 Data