Eva Alcón

The study deals with the effect of instruction and study abroad (SA) on pragmatic knowledge. More specifically, the focus is on gains in explicit knowledge of request mitigators, and whether learners draw on this knowledge when they perform email requests. Email requests produced by 60 Spanish students staying abroad (30 treatment/30 control group) were analysed as regards the frequency of internal mitigators on four separate occasions.

Previous research has shown that adolescent second language learners benefit from pragmatic instruction during study abroad (Alcón-Soler, 2015). As a follow-up investigation, the present study looked at late adolescent study-abroad learners, and it examined both the immediate effect of pragmatic instruction and the pragmatic trajectories that adolescent learners follow once they move from the instructional context to real email communication.

The present study explores pragmatic learning during study abroad (SA) programs, focusing on gains in learner recognition and production of pragmatic routines, and considers whether proficiency and type of routine play a role in this. One hundred and twenty-two international students in their first semester of study at US universities completed a pre-test and a post-test version of a vocabulary knowledge scale (VKS) and a written discourse-completion task (DCT).