Interlanguage pragmatic development of Turkish as a second language students

Ordering food or booking a table are some communicative tasks a student learning the target language (TL) in the second language (L2) context need to perform in everyday life by interacting with native speakers (NSs) of the TL and using speechs acts. To achieve these tasks without any misunderstandings, learners need to know the sociocultural features of the TL through L2 socialization. Thanks to exposure to authentic input and interaction with NSs in natural communication contexts, L2 learners go through L2 socializaiton, thus acquiring pragmatic knowledge of the TL. In this respect, this study aims to investigate the roles of exposure to natural L2 communication contexts, interaction with NSs of the TL authenticity of teacher talk and TL coursebooks in acquistion of TL sociocultual knowledge by L2 learners and their interlanguage pragmatic development through their use of requests and refusals. To achieve this, parallel-mixed method design was applied. Thus, both qualitative and quantitative data was collected and analyzed separately, but both kinds of findings were discussed in relation to each other. The participants of the study consisted of B2 level L2 Turkish learners studying at Turkish Language Teaching, Application and Research Center at four different universities in Türkiye, L2 Turkish instructors at these universities and NSs of Turkish. Data was collected through document analysis, Coursebook Authenticity Questionnaire, Social Interaction Questionnaire, Questionnaire about Awareness of Teaching Pragmatic Units, Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and recordings of online Turkish courses. Qualitative data collection and analysis include document analysis and content analysis of L2 Turkish coursebooks, analysis of request and refusal strategies used by L2 learners and NSs of Turkish and discourse analysis of the natural speech in recordings of the online courses. As to the quantitative part of the study, qualitatively collected data was analyzed statistically through some tests. Findings indicated that L2 Turkish instructors do not draw attention to pragmatic units in class although they stated in the questionnaire that these units should be covered in lessons. Furthermore, it was seen that teacher talk and cursebooks are not rich enough to provide learners with authentic input. Lastly, L2 Turkish learners was seen to be lack of social interaction with NSs of Turkish and exposure to natural communication contexts in the TL. As a result of these, despite being in the L2 context, learners have not gone through L2 socialization and differed very much from NSs of Turkish in terms of applying sociocultural norms of the TL in interaction.