L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A longitudinal study of Spanish service encounters

Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1818–1835

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L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A longitudinal study of Spanish service encounters Rachel L. Shively * Illinois State University, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Campus Box 4300, Normal, IL 61790, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 22 December 2009 Received in revised form 25 September 2010 Accepted 29 October 2010 Available online 9 December 2010

The present study examines L2 pragmatic development in study abroad, reporting on longitudinal research of service encounters recorded in situ between L2 learners of Spanish and local Spanish service providers in Toledo, Spain. The participants in the study were seven U.S. students who studied abroad for one semester in Spain. The data consist of naturalistic audio recordings that participants made of themselves while visiting local shops, banks, and other establishments. The study was longitudinal with recordings made at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester by each student, for a total of 113 recordings. Additional data included students’ weekly journals and interviews with participants. The analysis focuses on openings and requests and examines the ways in which students’ pragmatic choices shifted over time, considering the role of language socialization and explicit instruction in pragmatics in that development. ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Requests Study abroad Spanish Service encounters Second language acquisition Pragmatic development

1. Introduction Ordering a coffee, exchanging currency, mailing postcards, and adding minutes to a cell phone are just a few of the activities that make up daily life as a study abroad student. Service encounters such as these constitute sites for social interaction in which study abroad students must communicate their needs for specific goods and services, in many cases by means of their second language (L2). As newcomers to an L2 speech community, study abroad students may be confronted with interactional norms that differ from those of their home country. Cross-cultural pragmatic variation in service encounters includes differences in the length of greeting routines, request directness, acceptability of non-transactional talk, and content of closing sequences (cf. Bailey, 2000; Gavioli, 1995; Placencia, 2005, 2008; Ruzickova, 2007; Vélez, 1987). A language socialization paradigm argues that through day-to-day social interaction with more expert group members, newcomers to an L2 community begin to learn the rules of pragmatically appropriate L2 use (Duff, 2008). Explicit instruction on L2 pragmatic norms can also play a role in facilitating learners’ pragmatic development (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Rose and Kasper, 2001; Rose, 2005). As a frequent activity in which study abroad students engage, service encounters are relevant to understanding learning and social interaction in the study abroad environment. However, service encounters are also a potentially appealing object of study on methodological grounds. Naturally[2_TD$IF] occurring service encounters meet Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford’s (2005:12) three criteria for language samples in L2 pragmatics research: comparability, interactivity, and consequentiality. As goaloriented interaction, service encounters in a particular setting tend to be structurally consistent through time, and across place and participants, which lends comparability (cf. Hasan, 1985; Lamoureux, 1988; Kidwell, 2000; Ventola, 1987). They

* Tel.: +1 309 438 7185. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.030

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are also interactive and consequential in that they require impromptu turn-taking and negotiation (interactivity) and have real-life, social and material outcomes for participants (consequentiality). A handful of previous studies have analyzed pragmatic development in service encounters by L2 learners (cf. Bataller, 2008, 2010; Pinto, 2002, 2005), but none have examined this speech event in natural settings. Various authors (cf. Kasper, 2006; Kasper and Dahl, 1991) have emphasized the importance of natural data in pragmatics research. Tarone (2005:159), for example, argues that, ‘‘In the study of pragmatics, social context is critical, and it is imperative to find ways to study pragmatics in natural interactions, using techniques that minimize the shortcomings [of natural data].’’ Given their high degree of comparability, naturally[3_TD$IF] occurring service encounters are one candidate to answer this call. The present study takes a longitudinal approach to analyzing the learning of L2 pragmatics in service encounters in Spain by seven U.S. study abroad students. The goal is to examine the ways in which students’ pragmatic choices shifted over time and to consider the role of language socialization and explicit instruction in pragmatics in that development. The analysis begins with a background on service encounters, language socialization, and L2 pragmatic development, and is followed by a discussion of the research design, results, and conclusions. 1.1. Service encounters Retail and food-related service encounters, as typically monotopical and goal-oriented interactions, tend to display a routine structure (cf. Drew and Heritage, 1992; Ide, 1998; Kidwell, 2000; Lamoureux, 1988; Ventola, 1987; Zimmerman, 1992). In those cases in which a client must request a product from the service provider (i.e., rather than obtaining it in the store himself or herself) the following structural elements and sequence are typically present: (1) opening, (2) request for product, (3) optional negotiation,1 (4) provision of product or service, (5) payment, and (6) closing. Some elements may be realized exclusively through non-verbal means, for example, providing payment by simply handing money to the cashier. Due to local contingencies, not all of these structural elements may occur in every instance of a service encounter of this type, such as when a requested product is not available and provision of the product cannot be realized. However, the list above outlines the tasks and the order in which parties routinely carry out those tasks in such encounters. Although retail service encounters in a variety of cultures appear to have similar structural features (e.g., opening, request, closing), cultural differences also exist (cf. Aston, 1995; Bailey, 2000; Callahan, 2009; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2005; Gavioli, 1995; Lamoureux, 1988; Márquez Reiter and Placencia, 2004; Placencia, 1998). Cultural variation in service encounters includes differences in the degree of indirectness, formality, deference, and explicitness of requests (Placencia, 1995, 1998), divergent norms regarding the appropriateness of non-transactional and relational talk (Bailey, 2000; Placencia, 2005), and the role of client questions and expressions of gratitude (Aston, 1995; Gavioli, 1995), among other aspects. 1.1.1. Service encounters in Peninsular Spanish In an analysis of naturalistic encounters in corner shops in Madrid, Placencia (2005) reports on the characteristics of talk in Peninsular Spanish service encounters, focusing on openings and requests. First, openings function as a means for participants to enter into the interaction and a place for parties to indicate the kind of conversation being opened (Schegloff, 1979). Openings in Peninsular Spanish corner shop encounters were typically brief and frequently consisted of the informal adjacency pair greetings hola-hola (‘hi-hi’), although other more formal greetings such as buenos días (‘good morning’) and buenas tardes (‘good afternoon’) were also attested. In some cases, the first pair part of the greeting was not followed by the second pair part of the greeting, but rather, by the request. In Spain, how-are-you inquiries (e.g., co´mo estás?) are not the norm in the opening sequence of service encounters (Placencia, 2005). As Placencia argues, Spaniards appear to be strongly oriented to the transaction of the encounter and, thus, a how-are-you inquiry between unacquainted parties may be socially inappropriate because it delays getting to the business of the encounter. Requests function to indicate the reason for the visit or identify the business at hand. Requests for products or services project a response, verbal or nonverbal, to provide the requested item or explain why it cannot be provided. In Placencia’s (2005) Peninsular Spanish data, requests for products occurred immediately after the opening sequence, reflecting an orientation to the earliest possible initiation of the transaction. Requests were realized almost exclusively with imperatives (e.g., Dame un croissant, ‘Give me a croissant’), simple interrogatives (e.g., Me pones una barra de pan?, ‘You give me a loaf of bread?’), or elliptical forms (e.g., Tres barras de pan, ‘Three loaves of bread’). Want statements (e.g., Quiero dos barras de pan, ‘I want three loaves of bread’) and hearer-oriented conventionally[4_TD$IF] indirect forms (e.g., Me puedes poner un café?, ‘Can you give me a coffee?’) were also present, but only made up a small percentage of request types observed (Placencia, 2005). The predominance of hearer-oriented verbs (e.g., Can you give me X?) rather than speaker-oriented verbs (e.g., Can I have X?) and the frequent use of direct requests in Peninsular Spanish, as reported by Placencia, has also been observed by other authors (Bataller, 2008; Le Pair, 1996; Mir, 1993; Pinto, 2002) and in other dialects such as Argentine, Mexican, and Uruguayan Spanish (cf. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Félix-Brasdefer, 2005, 2007b; Márquez Reiter, 2000). Internal mitigation of requests occurred infrequently in the Madrid corner store service encounters. Spanish has a number of resources for internal mitigation, such as the diminutive (e.g., pancito, ‘little loaf of bread’), the politeness marker ?

?

?

1 Negotiation may occur if the service provider needs to clarify the specific needs of the client or, if the requested product is not available, the provider may offer alternatives.

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por favor (‘please’), lexical downgrading of the main verb (e.g., regalar, ‘to give as a gift’, instead of dar, ‘to give’), syntactic downgrading (e.g., quería un bocadillo, ‘I wanted a sandwich’), and hedging (e.g., unos seis de ésos, ‘about six of those’). In the few instances in which internal mitigation occurred in the Madrid encounters, Spaniards used diminutives and the politeness marker por favor as mitigators, not hedges or verbal downgrading (Placencia, 2005). Finally, in those interactions that contained an address pronoun, there was a preference for the informal tú (‘you’). Given that pragmatic norms in service encounters are subject to dialectal variation (cf. Ferrer and Sánchez Lanza, 2002; Márquez Reiter and Placencia, 2004; Placencia, 1998, 2005, 2008), many characteristics outlined above are specific to Peninsular Spanish. Of interest in the present study is the extent to which study abroad students learn the pragmatic norms of the speech community in which they live. Therefore, the features of Spanish service encounters described by Placencia (2005) were established as the target pragmatic norms.2 1.1.2. Service encounters in American English In contrast with Spanish, speakers of American English have a strong preference for speaker-oriented rather than heareroriented requests in both service encounters (Pinto, 2002; Vélez, 1987) as well as in other settings (cf. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Márquez Reiter, 2000). In service encounters, specifically, both Pinto’s roleplay data and Vélez’s naturalistic data indicated that want statements (e.g., I want a coffee, I would like a soda), need statements (e.g., I need some batteries), and speaker-oriented conventional indirectness (e.g., Can I get a sandwich?) are the predominant requesting strategies used in English. Ervin-Tripp (1976:29) described need and want statements as being used in the U.S. in ‘‘the transactional work setting, where who is to do what is very clear,’’ which aptly describes the service encounter context. In contrast, imperatives, simple interrogatives, and ellipsis – which are the most common request types in Peninsular Spanish service encounters – appear to be infrequent in U.S. service encounters (Pinto, 2002; Vélez, 1987). Addressing ellipsis, in particular, Vélez argued that the absence of elliptical requests in English fits into a more general preference for verbal explicitness in service encounters. That is, Americans tended to make information verbally explicit rather than rely on context. In an elliptical request, those elements that the participants assume are evident by the linguistic and extralinguistic context are not made explicit. With regard to request mitigation in English, Pinto (2002) reported that the politeness marker ‘please’ occurred in 67% of the roleplay service encounters in which participants requested a beverage. The only other form of mitigation present in drink requests was verbal downgrading using the conditional or past tense, but this strategy appeared rather infrequently. In his study of naturalistic service encounters in offices and retail shops, Vélez (1987) also analyzed openings and closings in American English. Americans typically opened interactions with the greeting ‘hi’, but how-are-you inquiries in the opening sequence were also attested in the corpus. The expression of gratitude ‘thanks’ was almost always used to close the encounters. Throughout the exchange, Vélez (1987) observed that service providers in the U.S. were attentive and friendly; they often made offers of assistance such as ‘How can I help you?’ and sometimes uttered the leave-taking ‘Have a nice day’. 1.2. Language socialization in the study abroad context Considering the differences between service encounters in Spanish and English, American study abroad students in Spain are faced with a new set of pragmatic norms. Language socialization theory is one framework that can be applied to understand how and why students adopt or resist the norms of the host community. Identified by Kasper (2001) as an approach that is ‘‘eminently capable’’ of examining L2 pragmatic development, language socialization theory posits that linguistic and sociocultural knowledge is acquired simultaneously through social interaction (Duff, 2007, 2008; Ochs, 1986; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986; Ochs and Schieffelin, 2008; Watson-Gegeo, 2004). As newcomers are socialized into the practices of the group, they develop their pragmatic competence, or the awareness of how language forms and discourse structures are used in socially appropriate ways to create meaning and index social roles, relationships, and identities (Blum-Kulka, 1997; Li, 2000, 2008; Ochs, 1996). Although primary socialization occurs in childhood, socialization continues throughout the lifespan as individuals enter new communities and take up new roles in society (Duff, 2003, 2007; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). Ochs (1986, 1990) argues that language socialization can be either explicit or implicit. The former refers to a more competent member of the community directly telling a novice how and when to speak in specific contexts, as well as explaining when events and activities happen. For example, a host mother may advise a study abroad student to use the formal second person pronoun usted in Spanish when addressing an elderly member of the family. In addition to explicit socialization, Ochs (1990:291) argues that, ‘‘the greatest part of sociocultural information is keyed implicitly.’’ Implicit socialization refers to the learning that occurs as newcomers participate in everyday activities and observe and interact with more expert members of the community. Although these processes situate novices as the primary recipients of cultural and linguistic knowledge, a language socialization approach emphasizes the fact that novices are agents in the process of their own development and may also socialize more expert members into understanding their own needs. In this way, socialization involves both agency and bidirectionality (Duff, 2007; Garrett and Baquedano-Lo´pez, 2002; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). 2 Although the participants in the present study were not living in Madrid, the research site (Toledo) is only 45 miles away from Madrid. Furthermore, through participant observation, the researcher confirmed that the pragmatic norms for retail service encounters in Toledo were similar to those described by Placencia (2005) for Madrid.

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Although the principles described above apply to both L1 and L2 socialization, the latter presents additional complexities (Duff, 2007). First, at the time that they are socialized into an additional language, adult L2 users have already been shaped by their first culture and have acquired a repertoire of pragmatic norms from their L1 speech community. As L2 novices are exposed to pragmatic norms in the L2, they may decide to either adopt or reject those norms and, in the case of the latter, may choose to maintain L1-influenced or hybrid practices (cf. DuFon, 1999; Ishihara and Tarone, 2009; LoCastro, 2001; Siegal, 1994). For example, Siegal observed that American and European study abroad students in Japan refused to use certain gendered linguistic forms and ways of speaking in Japanese that, from their perspective, were demeaning to women, even though they knew from experience in the culture that gendered language was appropriate in that society. These learners rejected sociolinguistic appropriateness because it came into conflict with their own identities and cultural values. On the other hand, even if L2 novices are highly motivated to adopt L2 norms, they may not have the same access, opportunities, and acceptance from the target speech community that children being socialized into their L1 typically enjoy (Duff, 2002, 2003). As an immersion context, study abroad offers the opportunity for students to engage in a large number of social interactions with members of the target language and culture. Through these interactions, students may become socialized into the pragmatic norms and practices of the L2. For example, in DuFon’s (1999) study on the L2 socialization of politeness in Indonesian, study abroad students were explicitly socialized by their host families to ask for permission before leaving the house. Through repeated participation in everyday activities, students also became aware of the social and religious identities (e.g., Muslim or non-Muslim) indexed by different types of greetings. Likewise, in Siegal’s study (1994), a study abroad student in Japan acquired aspects of the register used in giving formal speeches because of the opportunity that she had to participate in that speech event while in Japan. These examples indicate that pragmatic socialization in the study abroad context can occur both implicitly and explicitly. However, a finding that has been common to research in study abroad is that while members of the host culture may provide corrective feedback on grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, they tend not to provide feedback on pragmatic issues (Barron, 2003; DuFon, 1999; Iino, 1996; Siegal, 1994). Lack of negative feedback may provide evidence to students that their behavior is pragmatically appropriate when it is not (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 1996). The reasons for lack of corrective feedback about pragmatics may be related to concerns about damaging face (DuFon, 1999). Previous research also suggests that opportunities for pragmatic socialization may be limited in other ways. In some cases, members of the host culture may hold special norms for foreigners and interact with students in ways that would be pragmatically inappropriate among in-group members (DuFon, 1999; Iino, 1996). Participation in the L2 speech community can be restricted by additional factors, such as experiences of discrimination based on race and gender (Kline, 1993; Polanyi, 1995; Talburt and Stewart, 1999), difficulties in making contacts with members of the host culture (Barron, 2003; Ife, 2000), living arrangements (Churchill, 2003; Knight and Schmidt-Rinehart, 2002; Rivers, 1998), and program type (Allen, 2002; Freed et al., 2004; Wilkinson, 1998). Engagement in the day-to-day interactions through which L2 socialization occurs is also curtailed by issues of access to and acceptance from the L2 speech community (Duff, 2007). 1.3. L2 pragmatic development: service encounters and requests Despite the potential limitations on pragmatic socialization in study abroad, research on L2 pragmatic development in this context has revealed that learners generally adopt some of the pragmatic norms of the host country over the course of their sojourn abroad, often becoming more target-like pragmatically after four to nine months in the host country (cf. Barron, 2003; Bataller, 2008; Churchill and DuFon, 2006; Cohen and Shively, 2007; Félix-Brasdefer, 2004; Schauer, 2008). However, movement away from the pragmatic norms of the host country has also been attested (cf. Barron, 2003; DuFon, 1999; HoffmanHicks, 1999; Kondo, 1997) and L2 pragmatic development is subject to individual variation (cf. Kinginger, 2009; Siegal, 1994). With respect to L2 pragmatic development in service encounters, research by Bataller (2008, 2010) found that after four months in Spain, U.S. study abroad students became somewhat more target-like in their performance of service encounters in roleplays. In the roleplay scenario most similar to the interactions examined in the present study (i.e., ordering a beverage), Bataller’s students increased their use of two syntactic mitigating devices, the past tense and the conditional tense, a change that made learners’ requests more similar to the native Spanish speakers in Bataller’s study. This finding is consistent with previous research on L2 request development, which has also reported that L2 learners tend to increase their use of mitigation over the course of a sojourn abroad (Cohen and Shively, 2007; Schauer, 2007) and, more generally, as L2 proficiency improves (Kasper and Rose, 2002; Félix-Brasdefer, 2007a; Pinto, 2002). Bataller’s study also revealed a minor reduction in speaker-oriented requests and a small increase in hearer-oriented requests over time. Pinto (2002) and FélixBrasdefer (2007a) reported a similar trend based on proficiency level: as learners of Spanish become more advanced they use more hearer-oriented requests and fewer speaker-oriented requests. Considering requests in general, developments that have been observed in L2 learners over time and with increased proficiency include movement from direct to indirect requests, reduction of repetition and unanalyzed formulas, reduction in dependence on the politeness marker ‘please’, and greater use of target-like formulaic routines (cf. Barron, 2003; Kasper and Rose, 2002). In the model of request development proposed by Kasper and Rose (2002), learners at the lowest stages of L2 proficiency use direct, unmitigated requests and only at more advanced stages do they shift to more indirect forms and increasingly mitigated and syntactically complex utterances. Bataller (2008) also investigated service encounter openings and closings. In openings, both L2 learners and Spaniards preferred greetings. However, the Spaniards produced a wider range of greeting types compared to learners, the latter

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relying almost exclusively on the greeting hola, both before and after the semester abroad. Likewise, in the closing phase of the service encounters, learners used an expression of gratitude (i.e., gracias, ‘thank you’) 79–100% of the time, whereas Spaniards ended approximately half of the interactions by simply handing money to the service provider. The studies cited above focus on L2 pragmatic development in uninstructed settings. As research has indicated, without any instruction in pragmatics, learners tend to acquire pragmatic competence in the L2 rather slowly (cf. Barron, 2003; DuFon, 1999; Hoffman-Hicks, 1999; Olshtain and Blum-Kulka, 1985). At the same time, a robust number of studies suggest that instruction in pragmatics can be effective in enhancing L2 learners’ pragmatic competence (cf. Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Jeon and Kaya, 2006; Rose and Kasper, 2001; Rose, 2005) and has the potential to accelerate learning. Given this background on service encounters, language socialization, and L2 pragmatic development, the goal of the present study is to further explore the question of L2 pragmatic development in study abroad, specifically examining student learning in the context of service encounters. The following questions were created to guide the research: 1. In the service encounter setting, what pragmatic norms do students learn over the course of one semester studying abroad? 2. To what extent do language socialization processes and a small-scale pedagogical intervention contribute to students’ learning of these pragmatic norms?

2. Research design 2.1. Participants and research site The participants in this research were seven undergraduate students from a large public university in the Midwest U.S. who chose to spend a semester (14 weeks) during 2007 studying abroad in Toledo, Spain. All were native speakers of American English. Table 1 provides a summary of selected characteristics of the participants. Note that students’ names are pseudonyms. Participants were between the ages of 20 and 21 and were either in their second or third year at the university. The sample was skewed towards females (five females to two males). However, the gender composition of the sample was similar to the female-male ratio in the Toledo study abroad student population as a whole. All participants were either Spanish majors or minors and had minimally completed the first four semesters of Spanish language classes at the university level, or their equivalent. Five participants began their study of Spanish between the ages of 13 and 15. Jared was unique in that he started his study of Spanish in a Spanish immersion program in elementary school. Greta also differed from the others because she did not start studying Spanish until age 18. The range of years spent studying Spanish prior to study abroad was large, with Greta having studied only 2.5 years and Jared 12.5 years. None of the participants had spent a significant amount of time in a Spanish-speaking country or had studied abroad prior to their stay in Toledo. While participants’ languagelearning backgrounds varied, they shared a strong desire to learn Spanish, to speak Spanish well, and to be perceived by others as proficient speakers of Spanish. During their semester abroad, the participants were enrolled full-time (i.e., 12–15 credits) in university-level Spanish language and culture classes (e.g., conversation, grammar, literature, history) at an international studies institute in Toledo. Classes were ‘sheltered’, that is, taken with other study abroad students. All of the research participants also took an obligatory one-credit class, taught in Spanish by the researcher, focusing on strategies for language and culture learning. The curriculum for the course was based on the textbook Maximizing Study Abroad: A Students’ Guide to Strategies for Language and

Table 1 Summary of selected background characteristics of the participants.

Age Year in university Major/minor Age study of Spanish began Years studying Spanish Semesters studying Spanish at university Highest level Spanish class taken at the university Time spent in Spanish-speaking countries prior to study abroad

Chloe

Greta

Jared

Kyle

Megan

Miranda

Samantha

20 Third Spanish major 15 years

21 Third Spanish minor 18 years

21 Third Spanish major 6 years

21 Third Spanish major 15 years

20 Second Spanish minor 13 years

20 Second Spanish minor 13 years

20 Second Spanish major 14 years

4 years 4 semesters

2.5 years 3 semesters

12.5 years 5 semesters

6 years 3 semesters

7 years 3 semesters

7 years 3 semesters

3.5 years 3 semesters

Fifth semester composition course

Fourth semester basic language course

Fifth semester composition course

1 month

Two upperdivision Spanish courses 3 weeks

Fifth semester composition course

No previous trips

Four upperdivision Spanish courses 2 weeks

No previous trips

3 weeks

Fifth semester composition course 1 week

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Culture Learning and Use (Paige et al., 2006) and included supplementary activities from the corresponding instructors’ guide Maximizing Study Abroad: An Instructors’ Guide to Strategies for Language and Culture Learning and Use (Cohen et al., 2003). The Maximizing Study Abroad text focuses on providing students with practical tools and strategies to improve their L2 language skills, their understanding of culture, and their intercultural competence. All students from the researcher’s home university were required by the study abroad program to take this course during their semester in Toledo. The class lasted for 12 weeks, with [5_TD$IF]1 h[6_TD$IF]-long session each week. The topics for the course originated from a standardized course syllabus that was developed by the study abroad program. Finally, all of the participants lived with a Spanish host family with the exception of Greta, who lived in a student dormitory with approximately 60 other U.S. and Puerto Rican study abroad students. For those who lived with host families, only one international student lived in each household. Except for Jared and Greta, all of the students also met regularly with a Spanish conversation partner through a program organized by the institute. 2.2. Pedagogical intervention The study involved a small-scale pedagogical intervention. The intervention consisted of an hour-long orientation to pragmatics and approximately 30 min[7_TD$IF] of instruction concerning pragmatics. The orientation was conducted at the beginning of the semester abroad and had the following objective: to raise students’ awareness about basic concepts in pragmatics, the impact of context on language use, and how language conveys pragmatic information. Second, at week five of the semester, the participants received approximately 30 min[8_TD$IF] of face-to-face, explicit instruction on requesting in Spanish, which included discussion of a service encounter. This explicit instruction on requests was part of the curriculum of the obligatory one-credit course taught by the researcher (described in section 2.1) and was provided one week before students’ second round of service encounter recordings. Prior to the in-class instruction, students were asked to complete a short reading about pragmatics and speech acts in the Maximizing Study Abroad Students’ Guide (Paige et al., 2006) and then, during class, participated in two activities concerning apologies and requests in Spanish. The apology and request activities were taken from the Maximizing Study Abroad Instructors’ Guide (Cohen et al., 2003) and involved an examination of six different apology and request scenarios. Analysis of the scenarios included a discussion of the appropriate strategies for apologizing and requesting in Spanish, an examination of the social factors that influence speech acts, and cross-cultural comparisons between Spanish and English. One of the four request scenarios that students were asked to analyze involved ordering a drink in a service encounter. Students rated as ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ seven different utterances that could be used to make the request. For example, two of the utterances were Dame un café con leche. (‘Give me a café latté.’) and Puedo tener un café con leche, por favor? (‘Can I have a café latté, please?’). The students completed the activity in class, participated in a group discussion of the results, and then two natives of Toledo shared their own appropriateness ratings with the students. The class then compared the students’ and Spaniards’ ratings, touching upon both linguistic and cultural differences between the U.S. and Spain. One issue that was surprising to a number of the students was that the request Puedo tener un café con leche, por favor? was not appropriate in Spanish. The Spanish informants said that Hola. Un café con leche, por favor. (‘Hi. A café latté, please.’), Ponme un café con leche. (‘Give me a café latté.’) and Me puedes poner un café con leche? (‘Can you give me a café latté?’) were the most appropriate options. Finally, note that no discussion in class or in the textbook occurred regarding the appropriateness of the politeness marker por favor in requests. ?

?

?

2.3. Data collection instruments and procedures3 The primary data consist of naturalistic audio recordings that participants made of themselves while participating in service encounters in Toledo. Students recorded at least five encounters each week during weeks two, six, and eleven of the semester, resulting in a minimum of 15 recorded service encounters per student. To make the recordings, participants were instructed to carry a Marantz PMD660 digital recorder in a purse, backpack, or pocket and to record the service encounter from beginning to end, with the recorder hidden.4 For each encounter, students also wrote down pertinent information on a form provided by the researcher, including the type of shop, the reason for the encounter, and the characteristics of the interlocutor (e.g., age, sex). Students also commented briefly on how they felt the interaction went and why. In order to maintain the natural quality of the data, the researcher asked students to record the service encounters that they would have participated in regardless of the research. For comparison purposes, it would have been ideal for students to

3 The service encounter data were collected under the auspices of a broader project designed to examine social interaction in study abroad in various settings. In the larger study, over 40[16_TD$IF] [17_TD$IF]h of audio-recorded conversations between students and Spaniards in different settings were recorded. Only those data, instruments, and data collection procedures that are relevant to the analysis of the service encounters will be discussed here. 4 With regard to ethical issues, the Institutional Review Board of the researcher’s university and the international institute in Toledo both approved this method of collecting audio-recorded data based primarily on the principle that the speech of the Spanish service providers who were unknowingly recorded along with the students were speaking in a public place and that anyone in the vicinity would be able to overhear what they said. Public speech does not carry the same risks to the speaker as private speech, the latter of which may include elements that a person does not want other people to hear. Further arguments in favor of the data collection method employed in this study are that the identities of the Spaniards were totally anonymous and the fact that it would have been a significant barrier to carrying out the research to require informed consent from all of the individual service providers who were recorded, either prior to or after the recordings took place.

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Table 2 Number of service encounter interactions recorded by each student and totals. Week

Total recordings

Week 2 Week 6 Week 11 All weeks

42 35 36 113

Student Chloe

Greta

Jared

Kyle

Megan

Miranda

Samantha

6 5 5 16

6 5 5 16

6 5 5 16

6 5 5 16

5 5 5 15

5 5 5 15

8 5 6 19

record their service encounters in the same place each week. However, if students had been told to go to specific establishments predetermined by the researcher, they may not have had a real reason to be there, apart from the research, which may have taken away from the encounter as a natural interaction. In addition to the talk data, the following instruments were also employed: student reflective journals, interviews with students, and a background questionnaire. Students wrote one journal per week for eleven weeks, in which they were asked to report on their learning of pragmatics during the previous week. The researcher explained to students what was meant by the term ‘pragmatics’ and gave examples of issues to think about, so that students would have enough information to be able to write their reflection journals. The researcher did not reveal to students what specific pragmatic features of their talk would be examined. Students were given the choice to write their journal entries in either Spanish or English; all participants wrote in English, with the exception of Miranda. Finally, at the end of the study, each student completed a semi-structured interview in English with the researcher. The researcher was from the same home university as the students and spent the semester with the students in Toledo at the international studies institute. Because the researcher lived and worked with the participants, she was able to observe and interact with them in a variety of situations, as well as to interact with Spaniards in the community. The researcher did not accompany students while they made their service encounter recordings, but she did participate in a large number of service encounters in Toledo and kept field notes about those interactions. 2.4. Data analysis The participants made a total of 113 service encounter recordings, all of which were transcribed and analyzed by the researcher. The number of recordings made by each student and the totals are displayed in Table 2. Participants chose to make recordings in a variety of locations such as a convenience store, a small grocery store, the post office, tobacconist shops, reception desks, banks, souvenir shops, bars, and cafés. All of the service encounter recordings that students collected took place in establishments in the historic center of Toledo, with native speakers of Spanish who did not have a personal relationship with the students. The majority of the recordings lasted from [10_TD$IF]1 to [1_TD$IF]5 min[12_TD$IF], but there were also shorter and longer recordings. Finally, the researcher qualitatively analyzed students’ journal and interview data as a means to gain insights into students’ learning. 3. Results As discussed above, service encounters tend to exhibit a routine structural organization in which specific elements emerge in a particular order. Participants routinely oriented to the tasks expected in a service encounter: opening, request for product, optional negotiation, provision of product or services, payment, and closing. While no changes over time were observed with regard to the structural organization of students’ service encounter interactions, longitudinal analysis indicated that students did change certain aspects of their pragmatic behavior in the opening and request phases of the encounters. 3.1. Openings Openings in the students’ recordings were usually brief and overwhelmingly contained the greeting sequence hola-hola (‘hi-hi’). Other opening sequences were also attested in students’ data, including other types of greetings (e.g., buenos días, ‘good morning’) and non-greetings on the part of the service provider such as dime (literally, ‘tell me’, to indicate readiness to attend to the customer), preceded or followed by a greeting by the student. In a few cases, the local conditions of the encounter precluded greetings, an example of which is shown in example (5) in section 3.2[13_TD$IF]. There was no pattern as to which party initiated the interaction; both did so, depending on local factors. Although in most cases greetings occurred in pairs, sometimes a greeting – either by the student or the service provider – was followed immediately by the student’s request, a shape that was also attested in Placencia’s (2005) Spanish data. Two students (Greta and Jared) inserted how-are-you inquiries into service encounter openings with service providers with whom they were not acquainted. Jared did so in only one case, but Greta used how-are-you inquiries in three different encounters, one of which is shown in (1).

R. Shively / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1818–1835

(1)

Greta (G) buying medicine in a pharmacy with a female pharmacist (P) in week two

1

G:

hola

1

G:

2

P:

hola

2

P:

hi

3!

G:

co´mo estás?

3!

G:

how are you?

(2.0)

4!

4! 5

G:

6 7

G:

uh::::

5

(2.4)

6

uh- yo necesito:: (.) medicina?

7

1825

hi

(2.0) G:

uh::::

G:

uh- I need:: (.) medicine?

(2.4)

The second pair part to Greta’s how-are-you greeting in line 3 is obviously absent, as indicated by the two second stretch of silence in line 4. Following this silence, Greta hesitates and then in line 7 makes her request for the medicine. Her verbal request was accompanied by a written doctor’s prescription that she handed to the pharmacist. At the beginning of the semester (week two), Greta used how-are-you inquiries in the opening sequence of two additional encounters, one in a grocery store and another in a souvenir shop. In both cases, what occurred in (1) was repeated: the how-are-you was followed by a fairly long silence during which the service provider did not provide the second pair part to the how-are-you inquiry. Greta reported in her journal that after producing her how-are-you inquiry in those service encounters, the service providers simply stared at her with what was – from Greta’s perspective – an ‘‘unfriendly’’ expression. In her interview, Greta explained that she used how-are-you inquiries as a means to be friendly. As the data indicate, the service providers did not accept this personal frame and instead, maintained an orientation to a non-personal, transactional frame. After her week two recordings, Greta noticed that how-are-you inquiries were not having the desired effect on her interlocutors, as she wrote in her journal: ‘‘From this experience at the checkout counter I will know better next time that [the cashiers] really don’t care and that [the grocery store] is just a place to get what you need and leave. Next time I will say hola, buenos días, give them my money, and say gracias, adios.’’ This journal entry indicates Greta’s intention to adapt her behavior to Spanish norms and, accordingly, she never issued how-are-you inquiries in the week six and week eleven recorded openings, only the greetings hola and buenas. She shifted in her understanding of the setting and became aware of the transaction-focused frame that is typical of Spanish service encounters. Greta’s negative tone in her journal entry suggests, however, that in adapting to these norms, she had to resign herself to behavior that she found disagreeable—that is, not having the opportunity to exchange ritual how-are-you inquiries with service providers. She did not appear to understand how Spaniards themselves view how-are-you greetings, considering that, from the Spanish cultural perspective, the lack of a how-are-you inquiry does not convey unfriendliness. Furthermore, Greta did not seem to be aware that Spaniards convey friendliness in service encounters through other means, such as by engaging in small talk exchanges at the end of the service encounter (Placencia, 2005). While the data suggest that Greta learned the politeness norms of service encounter openings, she did not seem to learn the cultural point of view and the cultural values informing the behavior, suggesting that second language learning does not always go hand in hand with second culture learning. Jared made a similar observation in his week eleven journal about how-are-you inquiries. After going to the same souvenir shop two days in a row, Jared wrote: ‘‘I noticed that when I talked to the [employee] at the souvenir shop I said qué tal? [‘how are you?’] and he acted like it was out of place. I’d met him yesterday [in the shop] so I didn’t think it would be weird to greet him that way but apparently it was.’’ Jared’s comments indicate that he also became aware that how-are-you inquiries are not expected in the service encounter context. Both the talk and the students’ comments suggest that Greta and Jared were socialized into the pragmatic norms of service encounter openings through the reactions that they received from service providers when they made how-are-you inquiries. Facial expression and the absence of a response were implicit means by which members of the host culture communicated that students’ use of how-are-you inquiries was not socially appropriate at that moment. ?

3.2. Requests While the sequential position of students’ requests remained unchanged over time, the design of requests for specific products experienced a shift over the course of the semester, particularly in the use of verbs. Students’ requesting behavior changed over time from the predominance of speaker-oriented forms to the greater use of hearer-oriented and elliptical requests. Examples of request forms from student data are provided in Table 3. Table 4 provides a summary of the frequency of request types that students used at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester when they made routine requests for specific products or services in retail and food-related service encounters.5 At 5 Note that the number of interactions included in the analysis of requests is less than the total number of service encounters that students recorded. Tables 4 and 5 exclude requests for information (e.g., Sabes X?, ‘Do you know X?’; Do´nde está X?, ‘Where is X?’) and queries of availability (i.e., Tienes X?, ‘Do you have X?’). In addition, service encounter interactions in which a verbal request was not present (e.g., a service provider preempted a request by providing the service directly) were not included.

?

?

?

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Table 3 Request strategies and examples from student data. Verb perspective

Request strategy

Example

Speaker-oriented forms

Need statement Want statement Conventionally indirect

Necesito una carpeta (‘I need a folder’) Quiero enviar éstas (‘I want to sent these’) Puedo comprar eso? (‘Can I buy that?’)

?

Hearer-oriented forms

Imperative Simple interrogative Conventionally indirect

Ponme un tinto de verano (‘Give me a summer red wine’) Me pones dos cervezas? (literally: ‘You give me two beers?’) Me puedes poner un café? (‘Can you give me a coffee?’)

? ?

Un café con leche (‘A coffee with milk’)

Ellipsis

Table 4 Frequency of speaker-oriented verbs, hearer-oriented verbs, and ellipsis in the head act of the request by week. Week

Head act verb perspective or ellipsis

Total head acts

Student Chloe

Greta

Jared

Kyle

Megan

Miranda

Samantha

Week 2

Speaker-oriented verbs Hearer-oriented verbs Ellipsis

22/24 (92%) 0 2/24 (8%)

2/2 (100%) 0 0

5/6 (83%) 0 1/6 (17%)

3/3 (100%) 0 0

4/4 (100%) 0 0

1/1 (100%) 0 0

2/2 (100%) 0 0

5/6 (83%) 0 1/6 (17%)

Week 6

Speaker-oriented verbs Hearer-oriented verbs Ellipsis

10/17 (59%) 3/17 (18%) 4/17 (24%)

0 0 0

1/3 (33%) 0 2/3 (67%)

1/1 (100%) 0 0

0 2/2 (100%) 0

1/2 (50%) 0 1/2 (50%)

6/6 (100%) 0 0

1/3 (33%) 1/3 (33%) 1/3 (33%)

Week 11

Speaker-oriented verbs Hearer-oriented verbs Ellipsis

10/24 (42%) 8/24 (33%) 6/24 (25%)

0 2/2 (100%) 0

1/2 (50%) 0 1/2 (50%)

1/6 (17%) 2/6 (33%) 3/6 (50%)

0 2/2 (100%) 0

2/2 (100%) 0 0

4/4 (100%) 0 0

2/6 (33%) 2/6 (33%) 2/6 (33%)

65 59

4 3

11 10

10 8

8 8

5 5

12 10

15 15

Total number of head acts Total number of interactionsa a

Note: In some cases more than one head act was produced in each service encounter interaction.

the beginning of the semester, all seven students overwhelmingly (22 out of 24 requests or 92% of the time) used speakeroriented verbs in their requests for specific products. Midway through the semester abroad, use of speaker-oriented forms decreased to 10 out of 17 requests (59%) and then to 10 out of 24 (42%). Although this pattern was evident in the group as a whole, each student experienced a different path and made individual choices in adapting to Spanish norms. Hearer-oriented verbs appeared more frequently in the speech of Chloe, Jared, Kyle, Samantha and ellipsis in the food-related requests produced by Greta, Jared, Megan, and Samantha. Miranda was the only student who did not change her use of request forms over time.6 The specific request strategies that students employed at the three points in the semester appear in Table 5. As the table indicates, students used the speaker-oriented strategies need statement, want statement, and conventional indirectness; the hearer-oriented strategies imperative, assertive, and conventional indirectness; and ellipsis. 3.2.1. Hearer-oriented requests For those students who adopted hearer-oriented imperative, simple interrogative, and conventionally indirect forms, this development was linked to two specific lexical items that are frequent in Peninsular Spanish service encounter requests: poner (‘to put’, ‘to give’) and cobrar (‘to charge’). Chloe, for example, moved from speaker-oriented conventional indirectness to the use of the imperative ponme (‘give me’), as shown in two recordings that she made in similar contexts: a café in week two and a bar in week eleven, shown in (2) and (3) below, respectively. (2)

Chloe (C) in a café ordering food and drinks with a female employee (E) in week two

1!

C: Ho::la: uh- puedo tener café con leche y:

1!

C: hi:: uh- can I have coffee with milk and:

2

C: qué: es (.) eso?

2

C: what is (.) that?

3

(1.2)

3

(1.2)

4

C: es- qu- qué se llama- or co´mo se llama?

4

C: is- wh- what it is called- or how is it called?

5

E: caracola

5

E: conch

6

C: caracola

6

C: conch

6 Although it is an interesting issue, it is beyond the scope of this article to examine why Miranda did not change over time in the same way as did the other participants in the study.

R. Shively / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1818–1835

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7

C: u:: (.) una:::: croissant

7

C: u:: (.) a:::: croissant

8

E: croissant sí

8

E: croissant yes

9

((long pause while waiting))

9

((long pause while waiting))

10

C: gra:cias

10

C: thanks

(3)

Chloe (C) in a bar ordering wine with a female employee (E) in week eleven

1

E: hola

1

E: hi

2

C: hola

2

C: hi

3!

C: ponme un tinto de verano por favor

3!

C: give me a summer red [wine] please

4

E: cada uno::?

4

E: each one::?

5!

C: sí (.) y pon tapas? (1.1) tapas bien

5!

C: yes (.) and give tapas? (1.1) tapas OK

6

E: sí sí que sí

6

E: yes yes yes

7

C: bueno (.) gracias

7

C: OK (.) thanks

In the encounter in (2) above, Chloe makes her request for coffee using the phrase puedo tener (‘can I have’). Puedo tener is a request for permission, but has the intended illocutionary effect of asking that the hearer do something for the speaker. While ‘Can I have X?’ is a preferred strategy in food-related service encounter requests in American English (Pinto, 2002), this strategy is not pragmatically appropriate in service encounters in Spanish (Bataller, 2008; Placencia, 2005; Pinto, 2002). Not only is speaker-oriented conventional indirectness with poder (‘to be able to’) not typically used in requests in Spanish, but also, the verb tener (‘to have’) does not have the same lexical meaning as a generalized verb of consumption as ‘to have’ does in English (Pinto, 2002). In the context of this service encounter, Chloe’s meaning was understood and she successfully received her coffee, but the request was pragmatically inappropriate. In addition, while hearer-oriented conventionally indirect requests with the verb poder are, indeed, common in Spanish (cf. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Félix-Brasdefer, 2005; Márquez Reiter, 2002), in the Peninsular Spanish service encounter context they are not the norm, occurring in only five percent of corner shop encounters (Placencia, 2005). By the end of the semester, Chloe had adopted a more direct approach, using the imperative twice, illustrated in (3) above. In her journal, Chloe wrote that she consciously changed the way that she made requests. She learned from the explicit inclass instruction provided by the researcher in week five that the phrase puedo tener was inappropriate for making requests and that ponme was one of several pragmatically appropriate ways to request a product. After this class, Chloe reported in her journal that she stopped using puedo tener and adopted ponme in service encounters, a shift that was evidenced in the talk data. As (3) shows, however, Chloe did not consistently use the routine expression ponme correctly; while she uses this phrase

Table 5 Request strategy use by week. Week

Perspective or ellipsis

Request strategy

Student Chloe

Week 2

Speaker-oriented verbs

Hearer-oriented verbs

NA Week 6

Speaker-oriented verbs

Hearer-oriented verbs

NA Week 11

Speaker-oriented verbs

Hearer-oriented verbs

NA

Need statement Want statement Conventional indirectness Imperative Simple interrogative Conventionally indirect Ellipsis

2

Number of head acts = 65. Number of interactions = 59.

Jared

Kyle

1

1 1 1

4

4

Megan

Miranda

Samantha

2

4 1

1

1

Need statement Want statement Conventional indirectness Imperative Simple interrogative Conventionally indirect Ellipsis Need statement Want statement Conventionally indirect Imperative Simple interrogative Conventionally indirect Ellipsis

Greta

1

1 1

1

2 3 1

1

2 2

1 1

1 1 1

1

2 2

2

1 2

1

1 1 3

2

1 1 2

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R. Shively / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1818–1835

appropriately in line 3, in line 5 she omits the indirect object pronoun me (‘me’) that is obligatory in this context. Both Chloe and Greta commented in their journals that they had been translating puedo tener literally from what they would say in English. Three other students (Megan, Miranda, Samantha) mentioned in their journals that the in-class instruction on service encounter requests had an impact on the way that they made requests. Samantha wrote that, ‘‘I learned from class how to properly request something to eat in a café/restaurant. I never had known to use the verb poner before this week. . .I bought a café con leche at the cafeteria. I was able to ask for it correctly with ponme instead of how I usually say it with quiero [I want].’’ Hearer-oriented requests with poner appeared in Samantha’s recordings only in weeks six and eleven, after she received the in-class instruction about requests. Prior to week six, Samantha had almost exclusively used speaker-oriented need statements and want statements. In the case of Kyle, week two recordings indicated that, in situations in which he needed to request a specific product or service, he exclusively used a want statement with the verb querer (‘to want’) in the past subjunctive polite form quisiera (‘I would like’), as shown in (4) below. By week six and continuing into week eleven, Kyle began to use simple interrogative requests with the verb poner in similar types of service encounters, as in example (5). (4)

Kyle (K) buying a battery in a watch shop with male employee (W) in week two

1

K:

2

W:

hola

2

W:

hi

3!

K:

quisiera comprar una pila para ese reloj

3!

K:

I would like to buy a battery for that watch

4

K:

sí para ese

4

K:

yes for that one

5

W:

sí, la tenemos, sí

5

W:

yes we have it yes

6

W:

vente en un ratito

6

W:

come back in a bit

7

K:

[OK

7

K:

[OK

8

W:

[y la coges

8

W:

[and you get it

9

K:

vale, [gracias

9

K:

OK, [thanks

10

W:

10

W:

11

W:

date una vuelteci:ta

11

W:

take a little stroll around

12

W:

y dentro de:: cuarto hora la coges

12

W:

and in a:: quarter of an hour you get it

13

K:

bueno, muchas gracias

13

K:

OK, thanks a lot

(5)

Kyle (K) in a small shop buying batteries with male employee (E) in week six (prior to E addressing K in line 1, E was conversing with other people in the store)

hola

1

[eh?

K:

hi

[OK?

1

E:

venís juntos?

1

E:

did you come together?

2!

K:

sí. me pones un- paquete de::

2!

K:

yes. you give me a- packet of::

3

E:

de p[ilas

3

E:

of b[atteries

4

K:

4

K:

5

E:

hay alcalina::s? dos noventa y cinco

5

E:

6

E:

y (. . .) uno setenta

6

E:

(0.4)

7 8

7

[pilas, sí

[batteries, yes there are alkaline::s? two ninety five and (. . .) one seventy (0.4)

8

E:

es for camara?

E:

is it for camara?

9

K:

huh?

9

K:

huh?

10

E:

for camara?

10

E:

for camara?

11

K:

sí

11

K:

yes

12

E:

two ninety five, please.

12

E:

two ninety five, please.

((pause with coins moving and cash register opening and closing))

13

13

((pause with coins moving and cash register opening and closing))

14

K:

gracias

14

K:

thanks

15

E:

three, five

15

E:

three, five

Kyle reported that he learned about service encounter requests from explicitly asking his host father. In his journal entry from week four he remarked: ‘‘This week I learned a little more about requests when ordering. I asked my host dad how I should order things because I learned [in previous Spanish classes] that I should say quisiera or me gustaría [‘I would like’] and he said that dame [‘give me’] or me pones is much better. It wasn’t that quisiera and me gustaría were too formal but he viewed it as ‘who are you to tell me what you would like?’, which I found strange but he said that I need to tell them what I want and that

R. Shively / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1818–1835

1829

is all.’’ By asking his host father, not only did Kyle learn which request forms were and were not preferred in service encounters, he also received an explanation for why a Spaniard viewed one request as more socially appropriate than another. Observation of Spanish customers was another way in which students learned request forms. Samantha and Jared discovered through observation that the form Me cobras? (‘You charge me?’) was a way that customers asked to be rung up for a purchase. Prior to observing the use of this form, Jared had used a speaker-oriented conventionally indirect request in week six for this function, as shown in (6) below. In week eleven, the routine expression Me cobras? (simple interrogative) appeared in one of his recordings, displayed in (7). ?

?

(6)

Jared (J) asking to pay the bill in a hotel with male attendant in week six

1

J:

2

hola

1

(0.5)

2

podemos pagar la cuenta, por favor

3!

J:

hi

J:

can we pay the bill, please

(0.5)

3!

J:

(7)

Jared (J) asking to pay the bill in a bar with a female bartender (B) in week eleven

1!

J:

2

bueno, me cobras?

1!

(13.0)

2

J:

OK, you charge me? (13.0)

3

J:

son sesenta? o-

3

J:

it’s sixty? or-

4

B:

(. . .)

4

B:

(. . .)

(6.0)

5

gracias

6

5 6

J:

(6.0) J:

thanks

3.2.2. Elliptical requests In addition to the shift towards greater use of hearer-oriented verbs, a movement towards more frequent use of elliptical requests marked a second development. Elliptical requests appeared more frequently over time in the food-related service encounters of four students: Greta, Jared, Megan, and Samantha. For example, in week two, Greta used the inappropriate phrase puedo tener (‘can I have’) three different times in her food-related requests. During weeks six and eleven, however, Greta used only elliptical requests to order food and drinks. Examples (8) and (9) illustrate this shift. (8)

Greta (G) at a churro shop with a female (A) employee in week two

32 !

G:

y puedo tener agua de::: (1.2)

32 !

G:

and can I have water from::: (1.2)

33

A:

agua (0.5) mineral? (.) de botella?

33

A:

mineral (0.5) water? (.) bottled?

34

G:

no::

34

G:

no::

35

A:

normal

35

A:

normal

36

G:

de::

36

G:

from::

37

G:

sí, te- de:: um (3.0)

37

G:

yes, te- from:: um (3.0)

38

A:

de gri:fo:

38

A:

from the tap

39

G:

yeah de grifo:: sí

39

G:

yeah from the tap yes

40

A:

con hielo?

40

A:

with ice?

41

G:

sí (.) con hielo

41

G:

yes (.) with ice

(9)

Greta (G) in a café ordering waffles with American friend (S) and female employee (E) in week six

1!

G:

2

um tch h (.) un gofre con chocolat y- y nata

1!

(2.8)

2

G:

um tch h (.) a waffle with chocolate andand cream (2.8)

3

E:

[algo más?

3

E:

[anything else?

4

S:

[y- y- dos: gofres co:n chocolate y nata

4

S:

[and- and- two waffles with chocolate and cream

5

G:

pero todo seperados:

5

G:

but all separate:

The fact that Greta adopted elliptical requests rather than hearer-oriented requests may reflect her beliefs about politeness. Despite receiving the same in-class instruction as other students about the social appropriateness of imperatives in Spanish requests, Greta did not incorporate imperatives into her service encounters. Greta did notice from her own observations that imperative requests were common in Spain, but she did not view this behavior as positive. She wrote:

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R. Shively / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1818–1835

‘‘There are definitely many major differences between the people of Spain and the people of America in terms of asking for things. They are more authoritarian here and in my opinion they make their orders (for coffee in this example) into a sort of command: ‘Give me coffee.’ I have been taught to say, ‘May I please have a coffee?’ It’s just so different here.’’ These first culture beliefs about politeness may have influenced Greta’s request choices, leading her to choose elliptical requests rather than imperatives as an alternative to the inappropriate puedo tener. Although her shift to elliptical requests in the talk data suggests that she adopted the pragmatic norms of service encounters in Spain, her perception of the social meaning of imperatives as ‘‘authoritarian’’ remained influenced by her first culture. Spaniards, on the other hand, do not view imperative requests as authoritarian or imposing, but rather, as a clear and direct way to communicate what is needed. Jared also incorporated elliptical requests into his food-related service encounters. In week two, Jared made three requests with need statements, want statements, and conventional indirectness, whereas in week eleven, he made three requests using only ellipsis. Examples are shown below: (10) and (11) were recorded at the same meat shop, during weeks two and eleven, respectively. In the week two recording, Jared began his request with a conventionally indirect form, as shown in line 8, whereas in week eleven he exclusively employed elliptical requests. (10)

Jared (J) ordering ham at a meat shop with a male employee (E) in week two

1

E:

hola

1

E:

hi

2

J:

es posible so´lo comprar un poquito como:: ciento gramos?

2

J:

is it possible to buy just a little bit like:: hundred grams?

(0.6)

3

de:: algunos

4

(1.1)

5

3 4

J:

5

(0.6) J:

of:: some (1.1)

6

J:

o no

6

J:

or not

7

E:

a ver

7

E:

let’s see

8!

J:

como: puedo: comprar:: ciento gramos de: jamo´n especial de la casa?

8!

J:

like: can: I buy a hundred grams of: the special house ham?

9

E:

sí

9

E:

yes

10

J:

y:: también e:: lo-

10

J:

and:: also eh:: it-

11

E:

este es por entero

11

E:

this one is by the whole piece

(11)

Jared (J) ordering salami at a meat shop with male employee (B) in week eleven

1

B:

hola dime

1

B:

hi tell me

2!

J:

hola=uh:: cien gramos de:: este salchicho´n

2!

J:

hi=uh 100 grams of:: this salami

3

((long pause))

3

4

B:

algo más?

4

B:

anything else?

5

J:

uh: (.) cien gramos de este chorizo de bellota

5

J:

uh: (.) 100 grams of this acorn sausage

((long pause))

6

6

((long pause))

((long pause))

7

B:

algo más?

7

B:

anything else?

8

J:

uh:: cien gramos de:: este chorizo blanco

8

J:

uh:: 100 grams of:: this white sausage

(16.0)

9

(. . .)

10

9 10

B:

(16.0) B:

(. . .)

In addition to the change in request forms, Jared also commented in his journal that by the end of the semester he felt more comfortable and confident about participating in encounters at the meat shop. As can be seen in (10), at the beginning of the semester, Jared was unsure about how to order meat by weight and asked the service provider in line 2 whether it was possible to buy just 100 grams. The service provider’s lack of response to Jared’s question and his comment a ver (‘let’s see’) in line 7 indicate that either the employee did not understand the question due to grammatical or pronunciation issues or he did not understand it pragmatically. Pragmatically speaking, the service provider may not have expected that a customer would not know that meat can be bought in any quantity, small or large. By week eleven, however, Jared’s meat shop encounter in (11) went smoothly; he ordered his meat and finished the encounter without any misunderstandings. Jared explained in his journal how he felt about the service encounter in (11): ‘‘Out of the service encounters [for this week], I think the most successful one is the meat stand. I got pretty good at getting meat at the meat stand like a Spaniard. I feel like I was good enough at it by the end of the semester that they didn’t really know a difference in the way that I would order something and the way that a Spaniard would order something.’’ Through repeated participation in this everyday setting (Jared went to the meat shop frequently throughout the semester), he became confident about the appropriate linguistic and non-linguistic norms associated with interaction in this context.

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Elliptical requests also appeared over time in the speech of Megan and Samantha. However, the only student of the four to specifically describe how she learned elliptical requests was Megan, who reported that she learned about this form from the in-class lesson on service encounter requests. Other students may have also learned this strategy from in-class instruction or perhaps through observations of Spaniards in service encounters. 3.3. Address terms and internal mitigation Notable aspects that did not change over the course of the semester included the use of address terms tú and usted (‘you’) and the politeness marker por favor (‘please’). Regarding the former, students overwhelmingly employed the informal tú throughout the semester. The formal usted appeared in only three recordings, one from Greta and two from Megan, all with service providers in their fifties or sixties. Of all the students, Megan appeared to be the most concerned about correctly using tú and usted. She mentioned the issue frequently in her journal, reporting that she paid attention to how the address terms were used in service encounters and asked her host mother to explain when to use tú and usted in both service encounters and in other settings. The lack of change over time in use of address terms can be explained both by the fact that tú seems to be preferred by Spaniards in service encounters and by the observation that the participants were exposed to few situations in which the formal pronoun usted was routinely employed. Apart from participating in service encounters, students’ social interactions with Spaniards during study abroad were limited largely to informal contexts in which they spoke with their host family or their Spanish conversation partners. The institute where students took classes was also an informal context, as both staff and instructors cultivated a friendly and relaxed atmosphere and explicitly directed students to address them with tú. Internal mitigation of the head act (e.g., verbal downgrading, lexical downgrading, diminutive, politeness marker) was observed infrequently in the data. The only mitigation strategies observed were the politeness marker por favor and Kyle’s syntactic downgrading of want statements (quisiera). The politeness marker was used infrequently throughout the semester. In 113 interactions, each student employed por favor only one to three times in all of his or her recordings, and use of por favor did not change over time. Students’ infrequent use of the politeness marker and lack of internal mitigation in general was similar to what Placencia (2005) reports for Peninsular Spanish service encounters, with the exception that Spaniards occasionally mitigated requests using the diminutive, a strategy not produced by students. 3.4. Opportunities for pragmatic socialization As has been found in previous research on study abroad, members of the host culture were not forthcoming with corrective feedback on pragmatics issues. Host families reportedly only provided information when asked specifically by students and in no case in the recordings did service providers comment on students’ pragmatic choices. Even though service providers did occasionally orient to students as L2 learners (e.g., asking them about their Spanish language studies) and as foreigners (e.g., asking them how they liked Spain or how long they were staying in Spain), in the recordings providers never gave participants explicit corrective feedback. Thus, explicit socialization about the pragmatic norms of service encounters was limited to host families’ answers to queries by students. With respect to implicit socialization, some service encounter settings provided students with the opportunity to observe expert speakers using Spanish in the role of customers. For example, in small Spanish shops, customers often gather around a central counter next to other customers waiting to be served. In those cases, expert speakers could serve as models for language use. Other settings, however, did not facilitate observation. In banks, for example, customers typically wait in line at a distance from those being served. Students also visited establishments at times when no other customers were present, precluding observation. These constraints on opportunities for implicit socialization, coupled with the relatively few instances of explicit socialization, represent limitations on student learning in this setting. 4. Limitations Certain methodological limitations should be taken into consideration when interpreting the results from this study. First, although the recordings were of real-life interactions between students and service providers, students were aware that they were being recorded. This awareness may have altered their behavior in certain ways. For example, students may have monitored their Spanish more closely because of the presence of the recorder. Also, due to the in-class instruction on requests, it is possible that students became sensitized to the fact that requests were one of the linguistic features being investigated. Another limitation was the fact that students made recordings in a variety of locations. While the fact that participants went wherever they needed to go, regardless of the research, helped maintain the naturalistic quality of the data, the lack of a stable site takes away from the comparability of the encounters across individuals and over time.[15_TD$IF] 5. Discussion and conclusions The goal of the present study was to examine study abroad students’ L2 pragmatic development in the service encounter context. Overall, the changes in openings and requests suggest that students learned and adopted some of the pragmatic norms of service encounters in the Toledo speech community. Both explicit and implicit socialization processes were

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implicated in students’ learning. Explicit socialization took place through instruction by the host family and implicit socialization occurred through reactions from service providers (which students perceived as negative), students’ observations of Spanish customers doing service encounters, and repeated interactions in this setting. Explicit in-class instruction on requests also appeared to have an impact on some of the students’ requesting behavior. The most important shift observed in this study was in the use of verbs to make requests. Apart from the shift from speaker- to hearer-oriented verbs, there was also a decrease in the use of indirect and syntactically complex verb forms (i.e., downgraded want statement, conventional indirectness) and a corresponding increase in the use of direct and syntactically less complex structures (i.e., imperatives, simple interrogatives, ellipsis). While this progression reflected students’ increasing adoption of the pragmatic norms of the Toledo community, the finding differs from much previous research on requesting in an L2 which has observed a tendency for learners’ requests to become more indirect and more syntactically complex over time (cf. Achiba, 2003; Cohen and Shively, 2007; Ellis, 1992; Félix-Brasdefer, 2007a; Hill, 1997; Kasper and Rose, 2002; Rose, 2000). A key difference from previous studies is the communicative context of service encounter requests in Spain, in which direct – rather than indirect – requests are the target forms. Three factors may help explain why students used indirect requests more frequently at the beginning of the semester: L1 transfer, overgeneralization, and prior instruction. Given the predominance of speaker-oriented forms in American English and the high frequency of hearer-oriented and elliptical requests in Peninsular Spanish, the students’ shift suggests that they started the semester by transferring L1 pragmatic norms and then adopted L2 request norms over time. The more frequent use of conventional indirectness early in the semester may also be a result of overgeneralization. Despite the infrequent use of conventional indirectness in corner shop encounters, this strategy is common in Spanish requests in other contexts (cf. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Chodorowska-Pilch, 2004; Placencia, 1998). Students may have overgeneralized conventional indirectness from other situations in which it is appropriate. In addition, L2 instruction prior to going abroad appeared to have an influence on one student. Kyle wrote that he had been taught in Spanish classes at home to make requests with the polite verb form quisiera (‘I would like’), a strategy that he used during the first week of recordings. In this case, overgeneralization and prior instruction may have gone hand in hand; that is, a textbook or instructor may have presented quisiera as a request strategy that is appropriate in some contexts, which Kyle then overgeneralized to the service encounter context in Spain. Although six students moved in a similar direction from indirect to direct requests, individual participants sometimes differed in their understanding of the social meanings of the request forms that they ultimately adopted. Kyle learned from his host father how Spaniards viewed the use of direct request forms. Greta, on the other hand, interpreted the imperative in requests from her first culture perspective, as exhibiting an ‘‘authoritarian’’ attitude. An important part of socialization by and through language is that novices learn both the linguistic forms as well as the sociocultural information indexed by those forms. One difference between Kyle and Greta was living situation: the fact that Greta did not live with a host family made access to expert speakers’ perspectives on pragmatic choices more difficult. L1 transfer may also explain the low frequency of elliptical requests at the beginning of the semester and the use of howare-you inquiries in openings. In the first case, given the fact that elliptical requests are uncommon in American English service encounters (Vélez, 1987), students likely transferred their L1 preference for verbal explicitness into their L2. By the end of the semester abroad, elliptical requests appeared more frequently in students’ requests, a change that one student attributed to the in-class instruction on requests. In the second case, Greta and Jared’s use of how-are-you inquiries may also be the result of L1 transfer, since such greetings are appropriate in U.S. service encounters (Vélez, 1987). By week six, Greta eliminated how-are-you greetings from her recorded service encounters, but had not developed her intercultural skills to the extent that she was able to consider this aspect of interaction from the Spanish point of view, instead, viewing the pragmatic inappropriateness of how-are-you greetings as unfriendliness on the part of Spaniards. No changes over time were observed with respect to the politeness marker por favor. The fact that participants in this study used this mitigation strategy infrequently diverges from previous studies. Bataller’s (2008) data indicate that learners of Spanish frequently used por favor to mitigate service encounter requests both prior to and after a semester studying in Spain. Likewise, data in studies by Mir (1993) and Pinto (2002) indicated that L2 learners sometimes relied on the politeness marker in requests more frequently than did natives of either Spanish or English, perhaps because of its relative ease of use and the desire of learners to be polite in the L2 (Mir, 1993). Given that the studies by Bataller, Mir, and Pinto were based on elicited data, the results from the naturalistic data in the present study point to a possible method effect with respect to extensive use of the politeness marker by L2 learners. Despite the changes over time towards target language norms, students in the study still remained non-target-like in certain ways by the end of the semester abroad. For example, three students continued using need statements in week eleven, which is an inappropriate request strategy in the target speech community. However, it is worth pointing out that in spite of divergences from certain pragmatic norms of the host community, the participants in this study were almost always successful in obtaining the goods or services that they sought. In goal-directed interactions such as service encounters, one measure of success is completion of the task and the securing of a positive outcome. There was some evidence that adoption of the pragmatic norms of the host community made students’ service encounter interactions progress more smoothly. For example, Greta’s elimination of inappropriate how-are-you inquiries from her service encounter openings made her week six and eleven service encounters less awkward. However, there was no evidence that increased use of hearer-oriented and elliptical requests had interactional consequences. For example, Chloe’s shift from puedo tener to ponme did not have a demonstrable positive impact on the

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material outcome of her service encounters. In both cases, she was easily understood and successfully ordered her food and beverages. As Kidwell (2000) has argued, participants can rely on the social and institutional context of routine service encounters in order to understand each other and to carry out the tasks made relevant in this activity type. The macrosocial context of the research site may be another factor. As inhabitants of a town that receives a high volume of tourists, the service providers in downtown Toledo were accustomed to interacting with foreigners who were not expert speakers of Spanish and were likely not offended by the inappropriate puedo tener or other pragmatic differences. Although students’ pragmatic behavior may not have always had a direct impact on the material outcomes of the transaction, from students’ own perspectives learning the pragmatic norms of Spanish had other benefits. Students did not limit their goals to obtaining products and services, nor did they only define success in service encounters in terms of the transaction. Based on journals, interviews, and descriptions of their service encounters, it was evident that all seven students also had the goal in service encounters to be able to use Spanish like a Spaniard, in terms of both grammar and pragmatics. Thus, students’ descriptions of their success in service encounters also frequently included comments about how well they felt they spoke Spanish during the encounter. The students in this study all had high standards for their own L2 proficiency. A journal comment by Greta was representative of this group: ‘‘I like myself better when I speak Spanish well. . .it makes me happy.’’ All of the students were quite eager to learn about Spanish pragmatic norms and expressed pleasure at discovering Spaniards’ preferred ways of interacting in service encounters. Due perhaps to the fact that they were all Spanish majors or minors, part of students’ selfaspect while in Spain was strongly connected to their own and others’ perception about how well they were able to speak and comprehend Spanish. From students’ point of view, then, learning Spanish pragmatics had consequences for their own self-confidence and identity as a speaker of Spanish. That the service encounters analyzed in the present study had real-life consequences for students, both interactional and psychological, is one of the advantages of collecting naturalistic data for L2 pragmatics research. Compared to roleplays or questionnaires, the service encounter recordings that students made better represent how they engaged in real-life encounters in study abroad. Although service encounters constitute only a small part of everyday life in study abroad, they are not inconsequential or infrequent in students’ lives. 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Rivers, William P., 1998. Is being there enough? The effects of homestay placements on language gain during study abroad. Foreign Language Annals 31 (4), 492–500. Rose, Kenneth, 2000. An exploratory cross-sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22, 27–67. Rose, Kenneth R., 2005. On the effects of instruction in second language pragmatics. System 33, 385–399. Rose, Kenneth R., Kasper, Gabriele (Eds.), 2001. Pragmatics in Language Teaching. Cambridge, Cambridge. Ruzickova, Elena, 2007. Customer requests in Cuban Spanish: realization patterns and politeness strategies in service encounters. In: Placencia, M.E., García, C. (Eds.), Research on Politeness in the Spanish-Speaking World. Erlbaum, Mahwah, pp. 213–241. Schauer, Gila A., 2007. Finding the right words in the study abroad context: the development of German learners’ use of external modifiers in English. Intercultural Pragmatics 4 (2), 193–220. Schauer, Gila A., 2008. Getting better in getting what you want: language learners’ pragmatic development in requests during study abroad sojourns. In: Puetz, M., Neff van Aertselaer, J. (Eds.), Developing Contrastive Pragmatics: Interlanguage and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 399–426. Schegloff, Emmanuel A., 1979. Identification and recognition in telephone openings. In: Psathas, G. (Ed.), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. Erlbaum, Mahwah, pp. 23–78. Schieffelin, Bambi B., Ochs, Elinor (Eds.), 1986. Language Socialization Across Cultures. Cambridge, Cambridge. Siegal, Meryl, 1994. Looking east: learning Japanese as a second language and the interaction of race, gender, and social context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Talburt, Susan, Stewart, Melissa A., 1999. What’s the subject of study abroad? Race, gender, and ‘‘living culture.’’. The Modern Language Journal 83 (2), 163– 175. Tarone, Elaine, 2005. English for specific purposes and interlanguage pragmatics. In: Bardovi-Harlig, K., Hartford, B.S. (Eds.), Interlanguage Pragmatics: Exploring Institutional Talk. Routledge, New York, pp. 157–173. Vélez, Jorge A., 1987. Contrasts in language use: a conversational and ethnographic analysis of service encounters in Austin and San Juan. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas, Austin. Ventola, Eija, 1987. The Structure of Social Interaction: A Systemic Approach to the Semiotics of Service Encounters. Frances Pinter, London. Watson-Gegeo, Karen A., 2004. Mind, language, and epistemology: toward a language socialization paradigm for SLA. The Modern Language Journal 88 (3), 331–350. Wilkinson, Sharon, 1998. On the nature of immersion during study abroad: some participants’ perspectives. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 4, 121–138. Zimmerman, Don H., 1992. The interactional organization of calls for emergency assistance In: Drew, P., Heritage, J. (Eds.), Talk at Work. Cambridge, Cambridge, pp. 418–469. Rachel L. Shively (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Applied Linguistics at Illinois State University. Her research interests include SLA, pragmatics, discourse analysis, intercultural development, language learning in study abroad, and classroom discourse.