Experimental and Observational Data in the Study of Interlanguage Pragmatics.

A study compared (1) data on rejections of advice by native and non-native speakers collected from natural conversation with (2) data collected from a discourse completion task (DCT). Subjects were students in an academic advising session (13 native speakers, 11 non-native speakers of English) who responded to a DCT and students (18 native speakers, 21 non-native speakers) whose advising sessions were taped. The study demonstrates that although the use of DCTs has benefits such as availability of large samples and experimental controls, the technique also biases the data in certain ways. It particular, participants in this study used a narrower range of semantic formulas on the DCT, used fewer status-preserving strategies, and lacked extended negotiations found in the natural data. However, the DCT was found to facilitate testing of hypotheses derived from instances in the natural conversations where there was insufficient data. It is concluded that while there should be an increase in observational data in interlanguage pragmatics research, the DCT may also be used as an important tool to complement such data. (MSE) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ***********************************************************************