Pragmatic development in the acquisition of indirectness in a second language

---

Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Uludağ Üniversitesi, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2006

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: MURAT BAYRAK

Danışman: İSMET ÖZTÜRK

Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu

Özet:

The aim of this study is to investigate whether there is a pragmatic development in the acquisition of indirectness in a second language. It also questions the tendency to prefer non-conventionally indirect structures by the Turkish learners of English when requesting or rejecting offers and invitations. 69 EFL learners provided the data for the present study. The first group included 23 prep class students studying at a super high school; the second group consisted of 23 foreign language classroom students studying at the same school and in the last group there were 23 first year students of an ELT Teacher Education Department. The data for this study was collected through a multiple choice discourse completion test in which the subjects were asked to choose the best option in the given scenarios. There were 20 situations in the DCT, 10 of which were related to requests, 5 of them to rejecting offers and the other 5 to rejecting invitations. Among the contextual factors that might affect the level of indirectness, only size of imposition was held high. The results of the study indicated that there is no clear and systematic pragmatic development in the acquisition of indirectness in requests. However, there appears to be a partial development in rejecting offers and invitations The findings also showed that Turkish EFL learners mostly have a tendency to choose conventionally indirect patterns in requests; on the other hand, they tended to prefer non-conventionally indirect structures in rejecting offers and invitations.