Requesting in English as a Lingua Franca: Proficiency Effects in Stay Abroad

Abstract

This article reports on an empirical study designed to assess pragmatic awareness and production of 104 nonnative speakers of English of two different proficiency levels (intermediate and advanced). The paper first frames the study providing information on the users of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), a new communicative competence model that takes into account lingua franca users, and studies dealing with ELF topics. This is followed by the description of the methodology employed and a discussion of the results. The findings confirm that proficiency level has effects on the awareness and production of appropriate and correct request acts and request act modifiers. Statistical analyses show that advanced learners produce more appropriate and accurate requests than intermediate participants, which was also the case for most internal request modifiers. Advanced learners also appear to be better at assessing pragmatic and grammatical failure of some types of request strategies.