Insert and post-expansion in L2 Arabic requests

Abstract

Research on requests is a mainstay of interlanguage pragmatics work but has rarely investigated the development of learners' ability to participate in extended interactions. In this study, we are comparing requestive interactions involving learners of Arabic as a second language at four proficiency levels from beginner to advanced. Interactions took place in an institutional setting and were semi-authentic, i.e., triggered by an artificially created problem but not elicited or role played. Employing CA as a data analysis tool in an interlanguage pragmatics study, we focus on insert expansions between the request and request response as well as post-expansions subsequent to the response. With..