Introduction

The study seeks to reveal the mental processes underlying the performance of sensitive speech acts by adult learners of a second language (L2). As this is still a new research goal, the study is open-ended and exploratory in nature. It asks learners to report whatever they were thinking and then examines those reports to gain insights into what they know about pragmatics and how they acquire pragmatic knowledge and ability. It also aims specifically to clarify the relationship of two cognitive tasks: the task of acquiring knowledge and that of acquiring control over attention to knowledge (cf. Bialystok, 1993). A further aim is to assess the value of verbal report data for investigating learner pragmatic knowledge and acquisition. The subjects of the study are two groups of Australian learners of Indonesian: a low intermediate group of foreign language (FL) learners and an upper intermediate group of foreign/second language (FL/SL) learners.

Background

Thoughts underlying L2 pragmatic performance

The standard way of examining mental processes during performance of a task is to elicit verbal reports. These are either 'think aloud' reports provided concurrently or retrospective reports provided shortly afterwards while memory traces can still be retrieved (Ericsson & Simon, 1993). While many studies have used verbal reports to examine what L2 learners are thinking while they do language tasks (see e.g. Cohen, 1998: 35; Faerch & Kasper, 1987; Kasper & Rose, n.d.), virtually none set out to investigate what learners are thinking while they do pragmatic tasks. By these I mean tasks where interpersonal meaning is paramount – such as face-threatening speech acts. To my knowledge only two published studies in English have attempted to do so.