The present study investigates the development of request realization of Tagalog learners of English and the transfer of learners’ L1 pragmatic knowledge to the target language when learners make requests. The data were collected through written dis...
The present study investigates the development of request realization of Tagalog learners of English and the transfer of learners’ L1 pragmatic knowledge to the target language when learners make requests. The data were collected through written discourse completion task from three different English proficiency levels in six situations and compared against native speakers of English and native speakers of Tagalog. Statistical analyses reveal that as L2 learners become more proficient at L2, they demonstrate more positive transfer in their use of external modifiers and negative transfer in internal modifiers. L2 learners were found to differ from English native speakers with respect to perception of situational variations such as power and social familiarity. However, it was also found that all learner groups and control groups were equally sensitive to situational variations in the sense that they varied their uses of internal and external modifications as the situations varied. With respect to developmental stages in pragmatic development, learners’ overall proficiency cannot reliably predict interlanguage pragmatic development, which implies that there is a mismatch between a learner’s linguistic competence and pragmatic competence.