Modelling the relationships among interlanguage pragmatic development, L2 proficiency, and exposure to L2

Abstract

This study aimed to account for the different levels of pragmatic development among 137 university‐level Japanese learners of English, as functions of their varying levels of English proficiency and amount of exposure to English. Their pragmatic development was assessed by the degree of approximation to native speech act behaviour in various advice‐giving situations repeated during the course of an academic year. Unique to this study in interlanguage pragmatics was the use of structural equation modelling (SEM) with latent variables that permits formulation and comparisons of several competing causal models. Although the results revealed the persistent effect of pragmatic competence on itself over the duration of the study, they also suggested that amount of exposure had greater potential to account for pragmatic development than level of proficiency.