LEARNING TO REQUEST IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: A STUDY OF CHILD INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS

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LEARNING TO REQUEST IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: A STUDY OF CHILD INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS. Machiko Achiba. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Pp. xii + 223. $69.95 cloth.

This volume is one of those workhorses that could easily be overlooked. However, it represents one of the most detailed and extensive of the very few longitudinal studies of the pragmatic development of a child learning English as a second language. The learner, Yao (the author's daughter), is a native speaker of Japanese. At the age of 7, with only brief prior exposure to English, she moved with her mother to Australia, where she was immediately enrolled in a local school. Shortly after their arrival, Yao's mother began collecting audio and videotaped data of Yao playing with peers, a teenager, and two adults (a babysitter and a neighbor). Transcripts of these interactions—collected every 6 weeks over 17 months by Achiba, who was present as an observer—form the basis of the analysis. Despite the fact that Achiba continued to use Japanese with her daughter, Yao began early on to address her mother in English. Achiba was thus able to supplement the play data with a diary of additional requests by Yao to her mother as well as Yao's metalinguistic comments. Yao's requests were analyzed to determine the development of request strategies—linguistic realizations and modifications as well as variation according to goal or addressee.