Speech Acts Bibliography:
Negotiation
Bardovi-Harlig, K. & Hartford, B. S. (1993). Learning the rules of academic talk: A longitudinal study of pragmatic change. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15 (3), 279-304.
Reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic competence. Ten advanced adult nonnative speakers of English were taped in two advising sessions over the course of a semester -- an early and a later session. Two speech acts, suggestions and rejections, were analyzed according to their frequency, form, and successfulness and compared with similar data gathered for six native speakers. The nonnative speakers showed change toward the native speaker norms in their ability to employ appropriate speech acts, moving toward using more suggestions and fewer rejections, and became more successful negotiators. However, they changed less in their ability to employ appropriate forms of the speech acts, continuing to use fewer mitigators than the native speakers. Furthermore, unlike native speakers, they also used aggravators. The investigators claimed that these results may be explained by the availability of input: learners received positive and negative feedback from the advisor regarding the desirability and outcome of particular speech acts, but they did not receive such feedback regarding the appropriateness of the forms of such speech acts.