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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of an early partial immersion program as compared to a non-immersion program on English sociopragmatic awareness among Chinese kindergarten children six years of age. Of the 128 children who participated in the experiment involving the use of politeness perception tasks, half received three years of English immersion instruction and the other half were non-immersion children. The results indicate that compared with non-immersion teaching, the immersion instruction was found to be more effective in developing children’s English sociopragmatic awareness in terms of tasks that involve request strategies as opposed to reply strategies. The above results suggest that, apart from immersion teaching, speech act is another important variable affecting second language sociopragmatic competence during early childhood.

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