Learning to Request in a Second Language

This book examines the acquisition of requests in English by a seven- year-old Japanese girl during her 17-month residence in Australia. The study focuses on the linguistic repertoire available to the child as she attempts to make requests and vary these to suit different goals and addressees. This book helps unravel features of pragmatic development in the child's interlanguage, a subject about which we yet know very little.

Machiko Achiba is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at Tokyo Woman's Christian University (Tokyo Joshi Daigaku) in Japan and has been teaching for many years in the field. Her research interests are pragmatics, second language acquisition, and the methodologies of teaching English as a foreign language. She received her master's degree from Southern Illinois University in the United States and holds her doctorate from La Trobe University in Australia. She is the mother of this study's subject.