Impoliteness in interlanguage requests of EFL learners in Poland

This study intends to expand the range of studies on the acquisition of pragmatic competence in English as a foreign language, with special attention paid to impoliteness. It examines the development of one component of learner interlanguage pragmatics, i.e., requests, and looks for acquisitional patterns in modifying their impositive force in advanced Polish learners of English. A sample of linguistic written data was collected in a longitudinal study by means of a discourse completion task (DCT). The author seeks evidence of impoliteness by examining alerters, external moves, internal mitigation, together with strategies for expressing the directness of requests. On this basis, conclusions about noticeable impoliteness in the interlanguage pragmatic competence of the participants are drawn.