Compliment patterns in English: L1 and L2 production in the virtual exchange environment

Virtual exchanges offer affordances for the learning of L2 pragmatics as they allow participants to engage in authentic social interactions with expert L2 speakers. As such they constitute a valuable environment for L2 acquisition, especially in cases where study abroad is not feasible. Although there has been some interest in exploring the influence of virtual exchanges on L2 learners’ use of speech acts, compliment formulation has yet to be extensively explored. The virtual exchange discussed in this study involved L2 learners of English from Poland who interacted for six weeks, via video conferencing, with TESOL teacher trainees at a university in the USA. Before and after the project, the participants completed tasks to elicit their production of compliments. The significance of the study is twofold. Firstly, the L1 speakers’ responses to the task revealed more frequent use of certain syntactic patterns in complimenting behaviours (e.g. the increased use of informal ellipsis) in comparison to previous studies. Secondly, the compliments produced by the advanced L2 learners of English were seen to develop so as to resemble those of their L1 peers, contributing to a growing body of evidence suggesting that virtual exchange is a useful tool for fostering the enhancement of L2 speakers’ pragmatic skills. Interestingly, this development was seen to regard syntactic, but not lexical, features.