Examining authentic and elicited data from a multilingual perspective. The real picture of child requestive behaviour in the L3 classroom

Abstract

While child requestive behavior has received some attention in SLA research, very few studies have considered requests production and comprehension in young learners from a multilingual perspective (Safont and Portolés, 2015, Safont and Portolés, 2016; Portolés, 2015; Safont, 2017). However, data in previous studies were obtained either from completion tests or from natural classroom discourse. To the best of our knowledge, no studies have explored young learners’ requests in three languages by combining both authentic and elicited data.

For that reason, the aim of the present study is to provide a comprehensive picture of child requestive behavior in the multilingual classroom setting. We examine 127 young learners' requests comprehension and production in three languages by combining elicited and authentic data. Additionally, we investigate the effect of the language program adopted by the schools. Our results show that the combination of methods offers new evidence on the dynamism and complexity of L3 pragmatics. Findings further confirm the idea that we may best describe multilingual speakers' requestive behaviour by including all learners' languages and by resorting to authentic and elicited data. As a conclusion, we suggest that a monolingual approach in the study of pragmatics may provide us with a partial portrait of L3 learners’ pragmatic development.