Non-native speakers' production of advice acts: the effects of proficiency

Abstract

The present paper is part to the increasing research that has been devoted to interlanguage pragmatics over the last two decades. Different pragmatic aspects have been analysed, but in relation to the group of directive speech acts, requests have received a great deal of attention, in contrast to other speech acts, such as advice acts. Thus, we aim at investigating non-native speakers' production of advice acts from two different proficiency levels, determined by the educational setting they belong to. Results from our study show the effects of the proficiency level, since University students, the higher level group, produced not only a greater amount of appropriate advice acts, but also more modification devices, than Secondary School students, the group belonging to the lower level. However, both groups used a high number of strategies which were not identified in our proposed taxonomy, which seemed to be due to a process of pragmatic transfer. We finally suggest that farther research should be carried out paying attention to this transfer phenomenon in the English foreign language learning classroom.