ABSTRACT

This chapter presents data to illustrate how a grammatical construction emerges in an adult second language (L2) speaker’s developing repertoire of request formats and how the request designs display the speaker’s orientation to the local interactional context. Although adults learning an L2 are operating on years of experience as language users and learn in different contexts than children, similar learning trajectories have been observed in adult L2 learning. In developmental L2 speech act research, the pioneering efforts were longitudinal case studies that examined how L2 speakers of English change the linguistic forms of requests in natural interaction over time. Conversation Analysis’s (CA) distinctive approach has been extended to research on request sequences in L2 interaction, in particular in a series of studies by S. Al-Gahtani and C. Roever on requesting by L2 speakers of Arabic and English. For CA the habitat of action is social interaction.