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Applied Linguistics 2012: 33/1: 4265 Oxford University Press 2011

doi:10.1093/applin/amr031 Advance Access published on 24 September 2011

Proficiency and Sequential Organizationof L2 Requests

1,*SAAD AL-GAHTANI and 2,**CARSTEN ROEVER1King Saud University, Saudi Arabia and 2The University of Melbourne, Victoria

*E-mail: [email protected]

**E-mail: [email protected]

L2 requests in developmental pragmatics research are commonly investigated

using non-interactive data collection techniques or sidelining the larger dis-

course sequence in which the request proper is embedded. This study takes adifferent approach to the study of L2 requests. In a cross-sectional design, we

collected role play data from learners at four proficiency levels, and focused on

the sequential organization of the interactions and the impact of participants

proficiency level. Findings indicate that lower level learners were less likely to

project the upcoming request and lay the groundwork for it through ascertain-

ing interlocutor availability and providing accounts. They used fewer first-pair

parts and uttered the request early relying on the interlocutor to elicit further

information. The interlocutor also adjusted to learners proficiency level in keep-

ing complications to a minimum. Effects of the social context variable Power

were very limited but discernible at high-proficiency levels. We argue for a morediscursive approach to developmental data in interlanguage pragmatics that

allows the identification of interactional correlates of proficiency.

Developmental work has become an important area of research in interlan-

guage pragmatics (Kasper and Rose 2002). However, the field continues to

grapple with the challenge of describing the development of learners inter-

actional abilities beyond the level of isolated speech acts (Kasper 2006b). In

this article, we will investigate how learners second language proficiency af-fects the sequential organization of interactions built around requests and to

what extent social context factors built into the role play situation are reflected

in the interaction.

BACKGROUND

The speech act of request is the most studied speech act in interlanguage prag-

matics, and the acquisition of requests has been examined longitudinally and

cross-sectionally (e.g. recently by Rose 2000; Hassall 2001, 2003; Achiba 2003;Byon 2004; Alcon Soler 2005; Taguchi 2006; Biesenbach-Lucas 2007; Cohen

and Shively 2007; Felix-Brasdefer 2007b; Schauer 2007; Economidou-

Kogetsidis 2008). Overall findings from developmental studies of requests

atUludagUniversityonA

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indicate a move from single word expressions via unanalyzed formulae to

conventional indirectness and greater fine-tuning through more mitigation,

supportive moves and complex syntax (Ellis 1992; Rose 2000; Kasper and

Rose 2002; Felix-Brasdefer 2007b). However, learners in the foreign languagesetting tend to show less sociopragmatic development than learners in the

second language environment (Bardovi-Harlig and Dornyei 1998;

Matsumura 2001, 2003; Shimizu 2009) and are often not able to adjust their

production to the relative status of the interlocutor in terms of Brown and

Levinsons (1987) variables of Power, Distance, and Degree of Imposition

(Rose 2000).

Traditionally, much of the research on requests and other speech acts has

been conducted with Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs), which ensure a high

degree of standardization, enable researchers to manipulate variables of inter-est, and allow for easy comparison between participant responses (for detaileddiscussions of DCTs see Kasper and Rose 2002, in press). However, DCTs raise

validity concerns (Felix-Brasdefer 2010), and due to their single-shot nature,

they do not elicit sequentially organized discourse, and ignore the

co-constructed nature of interaction (Golato 2003). They are not suitable for

investigations that aim to uncover development of learners interactional abil-

ities with regard to the sequential organization of interaction and the effect on

the interlocutor.

More interactive approaches to the study of L2 pragmatic development in-

clude natural discourse, elicited discourse and role plays.

In a case study, Achiba (2003) used natural data from play time interactions

to track the development of requests by an L1 Japanese speaking child learning

English, and found an expanding repertoire of request strategies, more

target-like use and more specific addressee design. Other studies have investi-

gated acquisition of cultural norms and beliefs with regard to taste ( DuFon

2006), folk beliefs (Cook 2006) and social roles (Iino 2006), as well as sentence

final discourse markers in conversation (Ishida 2009), suggestions and rejec-tions in the academic advising session (Bardovi-Harlig and Harttford 1993,

1996), compliment responses (Shimizu 2009) and email exchanges(Kakegawa 2009). A major advantage of natural discourse is that it offers

completely authentic data, which is not attenuated by researcher intervention

(at least not beyond the effect of audio- or video-recording). However, it is

difficult for researchers to vary independent variables of interest systematic-

ally, such as L2 proficiency or situational context factors.

Elicited discourse is a somewhat more structured approach to the collectionof interactive data, and provides a framework for the interaction through a

task. It has a long history in general SLA research (e.g. Long 1983; Varonis and

Gass 1985; Pica 1988), and has been employed in developmental pragmaticsresearch to investigate the development of learners ability to compliment

(Billmyer 1990), use sentence final particles (Sawyer 1992), and perform dis-

agreements (Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury 2004). For example, Bardovi-Harlig

and Salsbury (2004) stimulated conversations through emotion cards

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(Rintell 1989) or preset topics, recorded the ensuing interaction, and then

identified and classified cases of oppositional talk. Elicited discourse allows

more researcher control than authentic data but is limited to eliciting casual

conversation. If learner production in a variety of social roles is to be elicited, arole play approach is more suitable.

Open, multi-turn role plays offer a certain degree of standardization as the

situational setting and interactants goals can be pre-determined by the re-

searcher but at the same time they elicit extended, interactive discourse.

This enables researchers to collect data from samples varying in a background

variable of interest (e.g. L2 proficiency) and to systematically vary the situ-

ational setting and context factors like Power, Distance, and Degree of

Imposition (Brown and Levinson 1987). Role plays have been widely used

in interlanguage pragmatics research to investigate the speech acts of request(Trosborg 1995; Kobayashi and Rinnert 2003; Felix-Brasdefer 2007b; Taguchi2007), apology (Trosborg 1995), refusal (Gass and Houck 1999; Felix-Brasdefer

2004; Taguchi 2007), and complaint (Trosborg 1995), expressions of gratitude

(Hassall 2001), compliment responses (Tran 2006), as well as gambits and

routine formulae (Wildner-Bassett 1986; House 1996). They have also been

employed in assessment settings (Hudson et al . 1995; Yamashita 1996;

Yoshitake 1997; Ahn 2005; Takimoto 2009; Okada 2010). In developmental

request research, Kobayashi and Rinnert (2003) found greater use of

pre-request strategies among high-proficiency learners as well as more

native-like adherence to sociopragmatic norms. Trosborg (1995) found that

learners at three proficiency levels were similar to native speakers in the use

of conventionally indirect strategies, but lower proficiency learners overused

want-based strategies and produced hints with little obvious requestive force.

Felix-Brasdefer (2007b) compared learners of Spanish at three proficiency

levels and found four stages of request development, identified by a move

toward more indirectness and more external modification. In a non-

developmental study, Okada (2010) investigated role plays as part of OralProficiency Interviews (OPI), and showed how candidates and interviewers

co-construct the role play interaction within the context of the OPI.However, role plays are not a panacea. Felix-Brasdefer (2007a) showed that

role plays approximate natural data but that they do not include some features

that are common in natural data. Role plays are inauthentic in that partici-

pants know that no real-world consequences are attached to the outcome of

their interactions (Kasper and Rose, in press), and participants are likely to

orient to the social situation of the role play itself (Aston 1993; Okada 2010).Also, they may be aware that the researchers interest is in their language,

which can make the role play more about linguistic self-display than about

solving a task (Al-Gahtani 2010).On balance, role plays allow a decent degree of standardization while elicit-

ing extended interactive data. However, elicitation is only the first step and

whether learners interactional abilities can be investigated also depends cru-

cially on the analytical framework employed.

44 PROFICIENCY AND SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION


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Analyzing interactive data for evidence of development

The majority of studies in interlanguage pragmatics have employed and

adapted categories developed for DCT data in the Cross-cultural Speech Act

Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). This approach classi-

fies components of speech acts as a set of semantically based strategies, and

researchers then count the occurrence of different types of strategies and com-

pare frequencies between learners at different proficiency levels (e.g. Trosborg

1995; Felix-Brasdefer 2007a, 2007b, 2008). This approach highlights shifts in

learners preference for certain strategies, and these shifts are understood as

indicative of development in the learners L2 pragmatic competence. Perhaps

the greatest weakness of the speech act set approach is that it does not easily

accommodate modeling of sequential organization: what a certain utterance

accomplishes can be strongly influenced by where it occurs in an interaction

(e.g. Schegloff 1993, 2007) but frequency counts of strategies cannot capture

this information and do not allow researchers to see systematic differences in

how interactants use interactional devices, only in how often they use them.

Being originally designed for DCT data, speech act set categorization

approaches also do not take into account the role of the interlocutor and the

fundamentally co-constructed nature of conversation.1 Furthermore, the cat-

egorization approach is silent on the segmentation of longer stretches of talk

into analyzable units, forcing researchers to develop and operationalize their

own segmentation criteria, e.g. episodes (Gass and Houck 1999). There isnothing in principle wrong with researchers developing their own segmenta-

tion criteria, but following a generally established analytical framework facili-

tates comparison between studies. Such a framework is offered by

Conversation Analysis (CA).

CA

CA was originally developed as a sociological approach, not a linguistic one,

and aims to understand how people organize social activities through talk(Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008). CA traditionally examines recordings of natur-

ally occurring ordinary, everyday conversation and proceeds under the as-

sumption that co-participants in interaction share a range of competences

that allow them to reliably analyze an interlocutors production, and display

to the interlocutor their reaction to that production (Garfinkel 1967; Schegloff

and Sacks 1973; Heritage and Atkinson 1984). CA tries to uncover the tacit

organizational principles that co-participants follow in co-constructing their

interactions turn by turn (Jacoby and Ochs 1995), and analysts do so by

using the same competencies that interactants bring to bear on their conver-sation (answering the question why this now?), thereby developing an emic

perspective that is anchored in the data (Seedhouse 2004, 2007). Its emic

perspective also means that CA is traditionally disinclined to use features of

the physical context, the social relationship between the interlocutors, or



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interlocutor characteristics as explanations for interactional conduct

(Seedhouse 2004). This approach contrasts sharply with research in second

language acquisition generally and interlanguage pragmatics specifically,

which uses elicited data, systematically manipulates task and participant vari-ables so as to observe their effect on a pre-determined feature of interest, and

tends to impose an etic analytic framework (like CCSARP) on the data.

While CA and interlanguage pragmatics may appear fundamentally incom-

patible, compromise positions have started to emerge. Dissatisfaction with

the overly atomistic and etic analyses in interlanguage pragmatics has led

to calls for a stronger integration of conversation analytic methods and per-

spectives (Kasper 2006b, 2009a). This has become more feasible through the

emergence of applied CA (Drew and Heritage 1992; ten Have 2001, 2007;

Richards and Seedhouse 2005), which has relaxed the traditional disinclin-ation to take the setting of the interaction and participant identities withinthat setting into account, and investigates how aspects of interaction are man-

aged differently in particular institutional contexts (Heritage and Clayman

2008: 18).

Although applied CA has mostly been used in workplace and medical set-

tings, its perspective is useful for the analysis of second language data, which

violates CAs basic assumption of shared competences (Firth and Wagner 2007;

Taleghani-Nikazm and Huth 2010). The participant characteristic of second

language speaker thus becomes analytically relevant, and research has inves-

tigated the overall normality of second language talk (Gardner and Wagner

2004; Taleghani-Nikazm and Huth 2010), features of Oral Proficiency

Interviews (Young and He 1998; Kasper 2006a; Kasper and Ross 2007), lan-

guage learning in instructed settings (recently Mori and Hayashi 2006;

Hellermann 2007, 2009, 2011; Mori and Hasegawa 2009) and the develop-

ment of discourse markers in Korean (Kim 2009) and Japanese (Ishida 2009).

Brouwer and Wagner (2004) suggest a situated learning framework (Lave and

Wenger 1991) to account for changes in language users interactional practicesover time although such an approach is potentially epistemologically problem-

atic (Kasper 2009b).Due to its focus on the generic machinery (Sacks 1995) of interaction, CAs

analytical interest is in the sequential organization of requests. From a CA

perspective, a request sequence is built around a central adjacency pair of

requestacceptance/rejection (Schegloff 2007). Anything external to this

adjacency pair is strictly optional, can precede it (pre-expansion), be inserted

between the first and second pair part (insert expansion), or follow it(post-expansion). Their late sequential placement in an interaction and the

modifying moves preceding them indicates that interactants consider requests

dispreferred actions, whereas offers are the corresponding preferred action(Schegloff 1990, 2007; Sacks 1995). Empirical studies of requests in pure

and applied CA include Taleghani-Nikazms (2005, 2006) analysis of

German requests in ordinary conversation, Heinemanns (2006) investigation

of positive and negative requests in home care settings, Vinkhuyzen and



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Szymanskis (2005) study of service requests in a copy shop, Curl and Drews

(2008) comparison of contingency in ordinary phone calls and those made to a

medical service, and Lees (2009) analysis of the organization of extended

requests in calls to an airline. Very little research exists in CA on requests bysecond language speakers, with the only exception being Taleghani-Nikazm

and Huths study (2010), which showed that advanced learners of German

sequentially organize requests similarly to native speakers. No research has

investigated the sequential organization of requests by learners at different

levels of proficiency, although such a cross-sectional, vertical comparison

(Zimmermann 1999) approach would enable a description of learners de-

veloping interactional abilities for managing this social action.

In this study, we will employ conversation analytic methods for the purposes

of such vertical comparison and in the tradition of applied CA to describe how(if at all) request sequences co-produced by learners at different levels of L2

proficiency differ systematically. Our use of role play data and a trained inter-

locutor constitutes the greatest deviation from CAs approach of using natural

data, and it is our major concession to the theory-driven research agenda of

interlanguage pragmatics, which requires a pre-existing research question and

the collection of a corpus of focused and comparable data. However, we do

follow CA in taking an emic perspective and attempting to uncover procedures

that interactants demonstrably use in co-constructing their request sequences.

We will also analyze how the participants deployment of interactional re-

sources affects the interlocutors responses.

Due to the cross-sectional nature of our data, we cannot address the issue of

how learning occurs in situ, and we will be largely sidestepping the discussion

of learning in CA and CA-for-SLA (e.g. Kasper 2009b; Mori and Markee 2009).

However, we will account for differences between proficiency groups in broad

strokes from an interlanguage pragmatics perspective.

THIS STUDY

This study uses a cross-sectional design to find differences in the organiza-

tion of interaction between participants at different proficiency levels, and

within the proficiency levels, for different settings of the context factor

Power. It thereby aims to highlight how participants general L2 proficiency

affects the interactional resources on which they draw. Our research

questions are:

How do participants differential general proficiency levels relate to

(1)sequences preceding the request (pre-expansions)?

(2)interlocutor insertions between the request and its acceptance (insertexpansions)?

(3)distribution of first- and second-pair parts between the interactants?2

(4)interactions in situations with different settings of the contextual variable

Power?



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METHODS

Participants

The participants were 26 male Saudi learners of Australian English.3 Saudilearners of English were chosen because this study was part of a larger project

investigating cross-cultural issues for Saudis communicating in an Australian

context. The sample was further divided into four groups (Table 1) based on

general proficiency. Participants in the beginner, lower- and upper intermedi-

ate groups, were studying ESL in a university language program in Melbourne

with the intention of ultimately embarking on a course of tertiary academic

study. Participants in the fourth group (advanced) were not enrolled in the

ESL program; five of them were undertaking Masters degrees in various facul-

ties at two universities in Melbourne; one was undertaking a PhD; and twowere physicians working at Melbourne hospitals.

The students in the language program took a placement test at the beginning

of the program and were subsequently assigned to one of five levels. We took

participants level in the language program as the main indicator of profi-

ciency, and to ensure that the upper intermediate and advanced groups

were clearly different, we administered a C-test with three texts (25 gapseach) to both groups and collected self-reported information about their

IELTS scores. The groups did not overlap on either measure. All groups also

differed in their length of stay in Australia.The role play interlocutor/conductor was one of the researchers. An MA

student in Applied Linguistics at the time of data collection, he is a native

speaker of Saudi Arabic and highly proficient in English.

Instruments

The role plays for the present study included three request situations, which

were designed to vary the influence of one context variable (Power) and were

set in an Australian English speaking environment. All situations were de-

signed to be low imposition and low social distance.

Table 1: Groups

Beginners Lowintermediate

Upperintermediate

Advanced

N 5 5 8 8

Age (years) 1922 1924 2539 2736

Course level 1 3 5 Master and PhD

studentsIELTS score n/a n/a 45.5 6.5 and above

C-test (75 max) n/a n/a 1630 4051

Residence 12 weeks 46 weeks 68 months 23 years



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Each situation contained a complicating factor to ensure longer conversations

(Halleck 2007) and make the role play more challenging for participants. This

factor was known to the role play interlocutor but not mentioned on the par-

ticipants role play cards. In Situation 1 (Bread, P=),4

the participant asks hishousemate to go to the supermarket and buy some bread but the complication is

that the housemate is watching TV and would prefer not to go immediately. In

Situation 2 (Lecture Notes, P+), the participant is a student who asks his pro-

fessor to give him the lecture notes from the last lecture, which he did not attend

due to illness. Instead of acceding to the request right away, the professor first

asks him why he did not attend and whether he is feeling better. In Situation 3

(Class Canceled, P-), the participant is a tutor (teaching assistant) who asks one

of his students to inform the other classmates that there is no seminar that day.

The student confirms the information before accepting the request.In order to find any design problems with these role play situations, they

were piloted with two Saudi learners of English. A detailed role play card for

each situation was prepared for all participants (Supplementary Appendix SB).

Procedures

The three role plays were conducted in individual sessions and audio taped.

They were all led by the same conductor in order to eliminate variability be-

tween interlocutors.

The role play conductor strove to treat all participants equally but did notuse static scripts and adapted to the participants as necessary. To obtain request

data from each participant, the role play conductor was not to accept partici-

pants requests unless they were on the record, i.e. his instructions were to not

accept hints as requests or make offers. While the role play conductor knew

the proficiency levels of the participants and was acquainted with research in

interlanguage pragmatics, it is important to note that he had no familiarity

with conversation analysis or other methodologies for the sequential analysis

of extended discourse at the time the role plays were run. In fact, the role plays

were designed to be analyzed through a traditional, head-act focused speechact analysis following CCSARP with no attention to their sequential organiza-

tion. The conductor did not consciously influence sequential organization

other than by trying to elicit an on-record request and to introduce the com-

plicating element.

All role plays were transcribed following the conventions used by Heritage

(1984) (Supplementary Appendix SA) and subsequently analyzed for their

sequential organization.5

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Effects of proficiency were most directly apparent with regard to pre-

expansions, insert expansions and the suppliance of first-pair parts.

However, effects of the social variable Power were far less obvious.



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Pre-expansion: the participants work

A pre-expansion is an optional sequence that precedes a first-pair part and in

our case followed the ubiquitous opening sequence with greetings or sum-

mons, and optional how-are-you exchanges. Pre-expansions were sometimes

opened with preliminaries to preliminaries or pre-pres (Schegloff 2007), such

as can you help me?, can you do me a favor please?, etc. Pre-expansions

occurred in the beginner group only in three role plays, whereas the other 12

did not contain a pre-expansion as exemplified in Excerpt 1:

Excerpt 1: Bread, Beginner

1. P: "Excuse me::

2. I: yes

3. P: I (.) want bread

4. I: Ok

5. P: Yea::h

6. I: So:: you want bread?

7. P: Yes:: (.) it is enough in the ()

8. I: .hhh (.)>

you meanyou know< right now Im wa:tchingthis match so (.)

12. do you wa::nt it at the moment (.) or:: I can buy it later on?

In Excerpt 3, the participant opens the conversation with a greeting, and

then in line 3 produces a prepre, which could preface a question or a request

in a real-world interaction with an innocent interlocutor. However, given

the role play situation where both interactants knew that a request was the

target of the interaction, and the initial use of actually as a disalignmenttoken projecting a dispreferred action, it is likely that this prepre prepares

the hearer for the accounts in lines 5, 7, and 9, preceding the request in lines

910.

The advanced group also almost invariably showed pre-expansions, except

in two role plays. Excerpt 4 illustrates a sequence produced by an advanced

learner:

Excerpt 4: Class Canceled, Advanced

1. P: Excuse me

2. I: yes (.) Mr. (first name)

3. P: ! >can I< ask you: something (.) to do it?

4. I: SU::RE

5. (.3)

6. P: ! uhm:: I have an urgen:t meeting today an::d (.1) I cantattend the class

7. toda::y. Can you "plea::se tell your friends that Im not avail-able today?

8. I: hh I will (.) so::: there is no:: class today?

9. P: there is no class today

10. I: all right (.) I will tell them

11. P: okay (.) Than:ks

12. I: youre welcome

13. p: bye

14. I: bye



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Excerpt 4 starts with a summons and a response, followed by a prepre in line

3, which (though ungrammatical) projects the upcoming request. After a

go-ahead response in line 4, the next turn by P contains background by way

of an account and a problem statement, followed by the request itself. In line 8,I accepts the request and engages in a brief repair, clarifying that Ps unavail-

ability means that the class is not taking place, which P confirms in line 9. After

acknowledging receipt of this updated information, I confirms that he will pass

it on to his fellow students, and P closes the sequence with a sequence-closing

third (Schegloff 2007) in line 11.

It is notable that upper level participants overwhelmingly provided

pre-expansions whereas lower level participants did so rarely. The differences

in pre-expansion between the groups are in accordance with findings in trad-

itional interlanguage pragmatics research (e.g. Rose 2000; Felix-Brasdefer2007b) that higher proficiency learners use more supportive moves, presum-ably because their greater automatization and advanced control of the L2

makes it easier for them to produce more extensive utterances. While this is

true, sequential analyses show that the placement of pre-expansions differed

between higher- and lower level groups, pointing to a noticeable proficiency

effect on sequential organization. The main difference was that higher level

participants pre-expansions elicited information about interlocutor availability

and provided accounts, projecting the upcoming request. Lower level partici-

pants frequently produced the request first, and then relied on the interlocutor

to elicit reasons or simply accept their request (see Excerpt 1 for a typical

example). This is actually a very efficient strategy for speakers with limited

linguistic resources, for whom the production of extended discourse is difficult

and effortful: they make their request first, and if it is accepted, there is no

need for further explanation, because post-expansions do not usually occur

after preferred second-pair parts (Schegloff 2007). Only if the request is re-

jected do they need to go to extra trouble to reverse a rejection.

While the lower level learners tactic is efficient, the higher level learnersmore proactive approach allows them to steer the interaction. By providing

reasons first or performing checks on the interlocutors availability, they cangauge the likelihood of request acceptance interactively, and adjust their pro-

duction accordingly if necessary, for example by impressing the importance of

their request on the interlocutor, or abandoning a request altogether if it is not

likely to be accepted.

Overall, pre-expansions showed clear differences between proficiency levels,

and their greater linguistic ability allowed higher level learners more control ofthe progress of their request.

We also looked for evidence of situational variation but found very little. The

use of pre-expansions was similar across situations for each of the groups, withone exception: four out of eight participants in the advanced group integrated

accounts in the request turn in the Class Canceled situation rather than in

pre-expansion moves as they did in the other situations. This difference might

be related to the participant playing the more powerful role in this situation,



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which makes it less necessary to check for the likelihood of compliance before

making a request. Rather, requesters more powerful position might convey a

sense of entitlement, which allows them to go on the record without prelimin-

ary moves checking for availability or willingness. Other than in the case of theadvanced group, different degrees of Power associated with the interlocutors

social role did not seem to affect pre-expansions for any of the other groups.

Insert expansions: the interlocutors work

As interactions are co-constructed, it is to be expected that differences in pro-

duction between participant groups would also influence the interlocutors

production (van Lier and Matsuo 2000). This was indeed the case in several

ways. With low-proficiency learners, the interlocutor accepted the requestearlier and often did not introduce a complicating factor via an insert expan-

sion. In fact, with both lower level groups, there was no negotiation about the

timing of buying bread. In the Lecture Notes situation with the lower level

groups, the interlocutor did not provide an insert expansion with half the

participants, and asked the other half about why they were absent or whether

they are feeling better now, but never both as Excerpt 5 demonstrates:

Excerpt 5: Lecture Notes, Beginner

1. P: excuse me doctor2. I: yes (.) come in

3. P: I wa::s absent (.2) since last two wee::ks (.) I want handout

4. I: !Why were you absent?

5. P: I was sick

6. I: Ok (.) this copy is for you::

7. P: Tha::nk you doctor8. I: Youre welcome

P produces an account with a request turn in line 3, which I follows with a

question about Ps reason for his absence, thereby signaling that compliance

with Ps request is conditional on a satisfactory response to this question.

When P provides such a response in line 5, I acknowledges Ps explanation

as sufficient and grants the request in line 6.

With the higher level groups, a combination of the two questions was the

normal insert expansion as Excerpt 6 demonstrates:

Excerpt 6: Lecture Notes, Upper intermediate

1. P: .hhh yesterday (.) I was absent yesterday

2. I: yeah



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3. P: I want the handouts plea:se.

4. I: you want the handout:ts?

5. P: yep6. I: ! sure (.) but wh::y were you absent?

7. P: I was sick (.) yesterday

8. I: ! .hh (.) how do you fee::l >right now


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4. I: yeah

5. P: I want you (.) to tell your students (.3) my tea::cher is notcoming today

6. I: .hh

7. P: you can?

8. I: ! so:: there is no: class today?

9. P: NO class today,

10. I: .hh (.) sure (.) Ill tell them

Participants tended to react differently to the two questions, as illustrated in

the examples above: a you mean clarification usually elicited only a con-firmatory yeah as in line 3 of Excerpt 7, whereas a so (it means) there is

clarification usually elicited a repeat of the central proposition (NO class

today) as in line 9 of Excerpt 8 and line 9 of Excerpt 4 above, or an emphasis

on a limiting condition (today, just today). Whether this difference in par-

ticipant reaction is due to a different function served by the confirmatory

repair first-pair parts or is simply a result of proficiency differences that

make lower level participants more inclined to shorter responses, remains an

open question.

Because the interlocutors complicating utterances were pre-planned as partof the role plays, conclusions about different effects of Power cannot be drawn.

Leading the conversation: first-pair parts and repair

A further effect of proficiency level on the co-construction of the interaction is

apparent in the distribution of first- and second-pair parts. Due to the design of

the role plays, where the participant is always the requester, the role plays

generally have the participant produce first-pair parts while the interlocutorproduces second-pair parts, except for insert expansions, as Excerpt 9 illustrates:

Excerpt 9: Bread, Upper intermediate

1. P: hi ((name))

2. I: hi ((name))

3. P: .hhh >actually< I wanna ask you something?

4. I: ! Su::re.

5. P: .hhh today I have too many (.) assignments to do=

6. I: ! =Yeah

7. P: "so I have no:: more time (.1) to do my shopp[ing



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8. I: [.hh

9. P: for today (.) a::nd Im running out (.) the bread so could you(.3) buy

10. some bread for me?

11. I: ! su:re yeah (.) but you know (.) right n::ow Im wa::tchingthis match (.) so::

12. do you want it at the moment or I can buy it la::ter on?

13. P: yeah (.) thats all right (.3) you can do [this

14. I: [later

15. P: later on.

16. I: .hh

17. P: yep.

I produces a second-pair part in response to Ps greeting in line 2, and then two

go-ahead responses in lines 4 and 6. Only in line 11, where he introduces the

complication as an insert expansion after the request has been made, does he

produce a first-pair part and more than a one-word response. However, with

participants in the lowest level group, the interlocutor provides far more

first-pair parts as in Excerpt 10:

Excerpt 10: Bread, Beginner

1. P: "Excuse me::

2. I: yes

3. P: I (.) want bread

4. I: Ok5. P: Yea::h

6. I: ! So:: you want bread?

7. P: Yes:: (.) it is enough in the ()

8. I: ! .hhh (.) >you mean< there is nothing: in the fridge?

9. P: Yes

10. I: ! So:: (.) you wa::nt me to go:: to the superma::rket and getsome bread for you

11. P: Yes



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12. I: Ok (.) Ill go "now and get it for you

13. P: Ok

14. I: No problemIs first-pair part in line 6 may seem odd since it just reiterates Ps statement

from line 3, which I acknowledged in line 4. However, its function is that it

prompts P for more information, which P attempts to provide in line 7. Ps turn

results in a contradiction to his original request, and I initiates repair by pro-

posing a candidate solution in line 8, which is confirmed by P in line 9. Line 10

is interesting in that I effectively makes an offer by providing the request P

could make in this sequential position, which P confirms, and I follows up with

an offer of getting the bread immediately in line 12. In fact, I breaks protocol in

this case and in another ten out of 15 role plays with the beginner group by not

leaving it to the participant to produce an on-the-record request but rather

providing an offer. Through his provision of first-pair parts, I makes it less

necessary for P to produce long utterances, and creates an opportunity for

him to reply with yes or no. Such interlocutor-guided conversations are

common in interactions with the beginner group, and some degree of repair

occurs in nearly all role plays with the beginners, for example, in line 4 of

Excerpt 11:

Excerpt 11: Lecture Notes, Beginner

1. P: hi teacher

2. I: hello:: ((name))

3. P: this me (.) I want paper (.) my cla::sses (.) OK?

4. I: ! you wa::nt to get the handouts (.) for the la::st lecture?

5. P: >yeah (.) yeah

Applied Linguistics 2012 Al Gahtani 42 65

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