CLIL students' pragmatic competence: a comparison between naturally-occurring and elicited requests

Abstract

This study aims to compare the modifiers and strategies that students in content and language integrated programs (CLIL students) use when formulating naturalistic and elicited requests. A sample of 77 grade 10 students participated in this study; 24 students generated 60 naturalistic requests while they worked in groups on a history task and another 53 students generated 45 elicited requests in response to a written discourse completion test prompt (WDCT). The comparison showed that students used similar pragmatic categories (the marker please, direct imperatives, indirect query preparatory conditions and grounders) in both data sets. However, the naturally-occurring requests included a significantly higher number of direct strategies, whereas the WDCT requests had significantly more query preparatory conditions. We conclude that the routinized exchanges occurring during group-work do not always have the potential to fully reflect L2 learners¿ knowledge of request modification. In contrast, an elicitation prompt, like the one used in this study, can push students to employ more or different requestive pragmatic features.