4.0 Introduction

This chapter is concerned with the development of Yao's request realisation from very early in her English learning as she expanded the range of strategies and their linguistic exponents to express her request intentions over a period of 17 months. The chapter traces the emergence of these strategies and their linguistic exponents employed. In particular, the chapter addresses the following research question:

In an attempt to answer the above research question, this chapter seeks to identify relevant divisions within the period so that contrasts can be made within the developmental process and progress can be characterised. The purpose here is to create an analytic framework that will reveal developmental patterns within the request system.

What we describe hereafter does not attempt to test any one particular theoretical model of language acquisition. Instead, we have tried, by carefully examining the present data, to discover and characterise the developmental patterns and sequences of one child's request realisation. Inasmuch as any specific acquisitional framework informs this analysis, the framework that we have drawn upon is a modified version of that proposed by Schmidt (1993). While employing Schmidt's view that 'noticing' is an essential component of language acquisition, we do not mean to imply that such noticing must entail understanding. We take as evidence of noticing the inclusion in Yao's request system of features not previously used or not previously used in the same way. Noticing in this way may not be accompanied by evidence of understanding on Yao's part. This notion of contextualised emergence is the same as that which informed the studies of child second language acquisition by Pienemann (1980) and Nicholas (1987). By making use of this approach, we have tried to let the categories of the analysis reflect as openly as possible the features of the data rather than seeking to impose pre-determined categories onto the data.