Interlanguage pragmatic development in Hong Kong, phase 2

This paper reports on the second phase of a cross-sectional study of pragmatic development in Hong Kong. The first phase (Rose, 2000) involved primary school students ages 7, 9 and 11. Participants in the present study were secondary school students in Forms 2, 4, and 6 (ages 13, 15 and 17). A questionnaire was designed to elicit requests, with scenarios derived through exemplar generation and variable values arrived at through two rounds of metapragmatic assessment. The variable values were therefore determined by the participants, not the researcher. The questionnaire was administered in Chinese, with participants instructed to record their responses in English using a recording device provided to them. Data were transcribed and analyzed by the author and a research assistant using the coding categories for requests developed in the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). Results indicated ample evidence of pragmalinguistic development, particularly in what appeared to be the onset of pragmatic expansion in the Form 6 group's wider range of modals and the appearance of supportive moves. However, there was little evidence of sociopragmatic development, other than the increased occurrence of please in requests to higher status hearers.