Pragmatic development of Turkish EFL learners in terms of speech acts: Refusals, requests, and suggestions

This study, which was designed as a descriptive one, was conducted to explore interlanguage pragmatic development of a group of EFL learners. In order to follow pragmatic development of the participants, scenarios about three speech acts, namely requests, refusals, and suggestions, were prepared and these scenarios were modified around two social variables proposed in Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory, namely Power and Ranking of imposition. In this research, the participants' interlanguage pragmatic development was followed on a regular basis around a timeline covering one academic year and two different data collection instruments, namely Discourse Completion Tests and act-outs, were employed with definite intervals during this process. At the initial phase of the study, the participants were additionally asked to complete the given scenarios in Turkish, so that it would be possible to investigate the possible influence of pragmatic transfer on their L2 productions. At the final data collection period, also semi-structured interviews were applied in order to investigate the participants' own evaluations of their production processes. This study was completed thanks to the regular participation of 16 Turkish EFL learners. The participants' strategy use along with internal and external modification productions throughout the study were analyzed statistically. Overall, the results did not indicate significant changes in the participants' productions in English in terms of pragmatic development. It was seen that the participants' strategy and modification tool preferences remained stable for specific types for each speech act throughout the study. Keywords: Interlanguage, pragmatics, speech acts, politeness