Improving Chinese EFL Teachers’ English Requests: Does Study Abroad Help?

This article presents an investigation of L2 pragmatic development by a group of 19 Chinese EFL teachers who participated in a five-month program in Canada (SA group). A written discourse-completion task (WDCT) was administered to assess participants' pragmatic knowledge of how to make requests in English. They also completed a paper-based oral-interaction log twice during their sojourn. Compared with 19 English teachers at home (AH group), the SA teachers reported engaging in more interactive activities in English and being exposed to a greater number of different speech acts than did the AH group. They, like AH teachers, applied conventionally indirect strategies (ability, willingness, permission) the most frequently, then direct strategies (want and imperative), and then a non-conventional strategy (hint). They also demonstrated some improvement in their socio-pragmatic awareness of requests (i.e., a reduction in the use of the imperative in low-imposition scenarios). The lack of strong evidence of L2 pragmatic development in this study suggests that EFL teachers on an SA sojourn would benefit from pragmatics-oriented professional development before and/or during the time they spend in an English-speaking country.