1.0 The Background of the Study

This study was occasioned by my coming to Australia with my daughter, Yao, in May 1992. During our stay, I observed her pragmatic development in a variety of contexts over a period of 17 months, as she gained command of English. For the purpose of this study, which was begun when Yao had had no prior learning of English, I gathered data in the particular context of play situations so that I was able to control the data gathering using both audioand video-tape recording. The quantified data of the study comes from these recordings. In order to document her process of learning, I also kept a diary with notes on her utterances in English and the comments she made with regard to her language learning.

1.1 Interlanguage Pragmatics in Second Language Acquisition Research

Interlanguage pragmatics has been defined as ‘the study of nonnative speakers’ use and acquisition of linguistic action patterns in a second language’ (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993: 3). A growing interest in interlanguage pragmatics over the last two decades is reflected in the substantial body of research that has been undertaken (see Ellis, 1994; Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Kasper & Rose, 1999; and Thomas (in manuscript) for review). However, the bulk of the studies have focused on second language use rather than pragmatic development. That is, the great majority of research has been on the ways in which and the extent to which learners of a second language use pragmatic knowledge differently from native speakers of the target language. Consequently, the greater majority of the research has been cross-sectional and focused on adults. (Not surprisingly, the bulk of the studies with children have concentrated not on second language but first language acquisition.) There are only a few longitudinal studies that have investigated L2 pragmatic development (e.g. Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1993, on 10 adult learners of English; Ellis, 1992, on two child learners of English; Sawyer, 1992, on 11 adult learners of Japanese; Schmidt, 1983, on one adult learner of English).