Insert and post-expansion in L2 Arabic requests

Abstract Research on requests is a mainstay of interlanguage pragmatics work but has rarely investigated the development of learners' ability to participate in extended interactions. In this study, we are comparing requestive interactions involving learners of Arabic as a second language at four proficiency levels from beginner to advanced. Interactions took place in an institutional setting and were semi-authentic, i.e., triggered by an artificially created problem but not elicited or role played. Employing CA as a data analysis tool in an interlanguage pragmatics study, we focus on insert expansions between the request and request response as well as post-expansions subsequent to the response. With regard to insert expansions, we found that the interlocutor was affected by the learners' proficiency level in that he produced more post-first and fewer pre-second insert expansions with lower-level learners but this tendency was reversed for higher-level learners. In terms of post-expansions, lower-level learners barely used even minimal post-expansions while those were common among higher-level learners. Only advanced learners produced non-minimal post-expansions. We conclude that interlocutors use learners' display of their interactional abilities to adjust their own participantship, and that the social action of pursuing a desired response interacts with learners' second language proficiency.