Young Multilingual Pragmatics. A Focus on Requests in CLIL and Non-CLIL Settings

The present paper aims to contribute to research on classroom discourse and pragmatic behaviour from a multilingual viewpoint (Aronin in Multilingual development in the classroom: Current findings from research, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Studies on this issue have accounted for the effect of ESL vs EFL settings (Schauer in Intercultural Pragmatics 4:193–220, 2007), EFL versus CLIL settings (Nashaat-Sobhy in Revista Española De Lingüística Aplicada 31:467–494, 2018), and L3 contexts (Portolés in Multilingualism and very young learners, Mouton de Gruyter, 2015). The extent to which CLIL contexts may promote pragmatic development is still unknown (Tateyama in The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and pragmatics, Routledge, 2019). Similarly, findings in L3 educational settings reveal the peculiarities of multilingual pragmatics (Martin-Laguna in Tasks, pragmatics and multilingualism in the classroom. A portrait of adolescent writing in multiple languages. Multilingual Matters, 2020) that point out the need for further analysis. For this purpose, we have examined requestive behavior of teachers and students in CLIL and non-CLIL settings. In so doing, we have considered the specific formulas and peripheral modifiers used, as well as the goal of the request and the register in which they may be embedded. Unlike previous studies and following Aronin’s views (2019) on the need to adopt multilingual approaches in examining multilingual learners, attention is paid to the learners’ L3 (English), L1 (Catalan) and L2 (Spanish). Data for the study comprise transcripts from four video recorded non-CLIL and three CLIL lessons. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that (i) request modifiers would be more frequent in CLIL settings and that (ii) requests for information would mainly appear in the instructional register. However, these hypotheses have not been confirmed by our results. The classrooms examined shared some characteristics with non-CLIL and other CLIL settings but they also differed in terms of the forms and sociopragmatic variables involved. Results seem to contradict studies with an exclusive focus on the L2. Therefore, we conclude by acknowledging the importance of adopting a multilingual perspective in the analysis of multilingual students.