It is generally believed that interlanguage pragmatics and motivation play important roles in learning. Motivation is important because it determines the extent of the learner's active involvement and attitude toward learning. The major purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of integrative and instrumental motivation on the development of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) in Iranian English language learners. A secondary goal of this study was to assess the effect of the type of motivation on pragmatic transfer. To this end, the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) developed by Gardner (1985) was given to the students to distinguish learners with integrative and instrumental motivation. Finally, 40 integratively and 40 instrumentally motivated learners were selected as participants. Then, a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) regarding pragmatic transfer developed by the researchers was administered to the two groups. Two weeks later another interlanguage pragmatics Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was administered in order to elicit the required data from both groups. The findings demonstrate that there is a significant relationship between type of motivation and interlanguage pragmatic development and the amount of negative pragmatic transfer as well. More precisely, this study revealed that integratively motivated learners performed significantly better than instrumentally motivated learners in both ILP development and pragmatic transfer.

This research study empirically investigated the impact of study abroad context on L2 learners' pragmatic development compared with study at home group in Iran. For the study abroad group the participants were selected from the Iranian students who registered in a six-month program in language institutes in India (Mysore) and for the study at home group the participants were chosen from the language learners at the most outstanding language institute in Iran (Iran Language Institute) at the intermediate level. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) including request and apology speech acts was used to measure the gains in the two groups. The DCT was administered one at the beginning as a pre-test and then at the end of the six months course as a post-test. Overall, the study revealed significant development in study abroad learners' pragmatic knowledge, whereas this change in at home group was meager. It was also found that a correlation governs the growth in apology and request proficiency in language learning. This comparative study moreover yielded this finding that gender is not a determining factor in the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge specifically in request and apology speech acts in language learning.

This longitudinal study empirically investigated the development of request strategies in Iranian study abroaders. More specifically, this study aimed at exploring if length of stay in L2 context impacts learners' number and type of strategies. To this end, 72 students who registered in a six month study abroad program and 60 native speakers from U.S. Britain, Australia, and Canada agreed to participate in the present study. The learners in this investigation were tested at three phases. In the first phase, the study abroad (SA) group was given a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) at the beginning of the program as a pre-test. Three months later the same test was administered to the learners as post-test 1 and subsequently at the end of the program once again the test was given to the learners as post-test 2 in order to measure their achievement after three and six months sojourn. The native speakers were also asked to fill the DCT in order to compare the learners' responses to the native speakers'. Finally, through comparing the learners' performances in pre-test and post-tests with each other and with the native speakers', it was found out that first, majority of learners and native speakers used conventionally indirect strategies in their request utterances, second, the number of strategies used by the students steadily increased over time from pre-test to the first and second post-test and third, the type of request strategies used by learners changed to be native like at the end of their sojourn.