A Developmental-Longitudinal Study of Request External Modifiers in Authentic and Elicited Data

Abstract

This developmental-longitudinal study aims to investigate the pragmatic development of Iraqi EFL learners in the use of external modifications of request over four years of study in authentic and elicited data. The authentic data is natural requests of Viber and WhatsApp while the elicited data is discourse completion test (DCT). The researcher has collected 202 authentic messages and 192 elicited messages from 24 learners. The external modifications are coded based on Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s (1989) and Economidou-Kogetsidis’s (2011) taxonomy of external devices.

The results unveil that there is an evidence of pragmatic development in the learners’ use of external devices in the two types of data. Yet, the use of these devices increases with increased study years particularly when these learners produce their natural requests. Besides, this study reveals that the authentic data includes authentic results occur in real context whereby natural and spontaneous utterances are produced. Hence, the elicited data must be used in addition to other types of research instruments to arrive at valid results because it does not accurately uncover the learners’ real development