Sequential Organization of Requests by Learners Of Vietnamese

Abstract

The most comprehensively studied speech act in interlanguage pragmatics to date has been requests. However, the body of research on requests by L2 learners has mainly been done on English or European languages, such as Spanish, French or Hebrew as a second language. There have been very few developmental studies published on requests in Asian languages. For a relatively less taught and studied language like Vietnamese, the literature on L2 learners’ requests, especially pertaining to Vietnamese pragmatics, is close to non-existent. This study was implemented to gather a better understanding of interlanguage pragmatics of L2 learners of Vietnamese. Elicited data from role-plays of requests were analysed based on Al-Gahtani and Roever’s 2012 discursive approach which focuses on the sequential organization of interactions. Findings indicate that compared to higher-level learners, lower-level learners used fewer pre-expansions, and the first pair-parts occurred earlier in the sequence. The interlocutor also accommodated to learners’ proficiency level when introducing complications, which resulted in fewer elaborated request sequences from learners with lower proficiency. The findings offer implications for teaching Vietnamese as a foreign language as well as methodological implications for gathering data and analyzing the sequential organization of speech acts in South-East Asian languages, such as Vietnamese.