Conceptual fluency and the use of situation-bound utterances in L2

Recent research has found that L2 learners of high grammatical proficiency will not necessarily show concomitant pragmatic skills. Some scholars explained non-native-like production by the lack or low level of conceptual fluency and metaphorical competence in the target language. This paper, however, claims that this explanation is only partly acceptable because pragmatic skills in an L2 do not necessarily reflect conceptual fluency in the target language properly because individual variables rather than conceptual fluency play a decisive role in the selection and use of these pragmatic units. In order to investigate the validity of this hypothesis a survey was conducted with 88 Non-Native Speakers (NNSs) and 33 Native Speakers of English (NSs) who were given three types of tests: two discourse-completion tests, a problem-solving test and a dialog-interpretation test. Data were analyzed for two variables: cultural specificity of SBUs and individual learner strategies. The findings of the survey demonstrated the existence of three developmental stages which are characterized respectively by strong L1-culture transfer, false generalization, individual choice. Students in the third stage tend to choose SBUs on affective grounds and reject those pragmatic units which they find too culture specific.