Situated within the field of interlanguage pragmatics, this volume compares native speakers (NSs) to nonnative speakers (NNSs) at three levels of proficiency (basic, intermediate, and advanced) in their realization of English requests and apologies, with the purpose of shedding light on the grammar-pragmatics interface. Chapter 1 explains the main objective of this cross-sectional study—namely, to describe how Mexican Spanish learners of English acquire pragmatic rules for requests and apologies, specifically in terms of the process of gaining pragmatic competence and the role of grammatical competence in that process. Chapter 2 offers an abundant, cohesive review of the literature dealing with pragmatic competence, requests and apologies (across numerous target languages), interlanguage pragmatics, methodological approaches (single-moment and developmental studies), pragmatic transfer, and cognitive studies. Although politeness theory would have rounded out the review, the clarity, breadth, and synthesis of the studies reviewed still provide a solid base for what follows. Chapter 3 describes the methodology used to collect the data (a modified version of the cartoon oral-production task from Rose, Reference Rose2000), with a clear, detailed presentation of the research design and rationale for specific methodological decisions. In chapter 4, the ANOVA results are shared—an impressive amount of detail that Flores Salgado organizes according to “quantitative” and “qualitative” results. This terminology is somewhat problematic because what she terms “qualitative” is not truly qualitative but instead is a detailed discussion of the data in terms of percentages (descriptive statistics) to show what these results reveal about the learners’ developmental patterns (as opposed to the inferential statistics of ANOVAs and post hoc Tukey tests that she terms “quantitative” results and that identify whether there were significant differences for between-subjects effects and within-subjects effects). These sections, albeit oddly termed, in practice are highly useful in that they widen and sharpen the lens through which we see the contributions of this study (i.e., they highlight learners’ developmental processes, their degree of approximation to NS norms, and their reasons for opting out), and they make the inferential statistics more accessible and meaningful to a wider audience. Chapter 5’s discussion further centers the reader’s focus on the interpretation of the numeric results, and chapter 6 concludes with limitations, implications, and a discussion of contributions to the field.

The strengths of this volume lie in its comprehensive analyses, robust review of the literature, clear situation of the study in relation to prior work in the field, and insights regarding the acquisition process of pragmatic abilities—namely, the developmental processes that second language (L2) learners go through in gaining pragmatic competence and the effect that grammatical competence has on this process. Some of the results are not novel but resonate with what we already know, such as the findings that the use of direct strategies in requests increases as proficiency level decreases and that high levels of grammatical competence do not necessarily guarantee high levels of pragmatic competence. Where the volume contributes most in terms of new terrain is in (a) the detailed discussion of stages of pragmatic development as they correlate with specific syntactic patterns and internal/external modifiers (for requests) and with apology strategies and (b) the emphasis on the role of first language pragmatic knowledge as a tool for helping basic L2 learners advance in their L2 pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence. The suggestions given for the types of activities and how to incorporate them into the L2 classroom are not so detailed as to serve as a how-to guide for practitioners, but they are a valuable starting point. The author is to be commended for making her study relevant not only for linguists but also for language teachers. Her discussion of limitations and suggestions for further research is honest and on-target, which is also useful to stimulate others in the field to continue work in this area of interlanguage pragmatics.