Learning the Rules for Offering Advice: A Quantitative Approach to Second Language Socialization

This study focused on changes over time in university‐level Japanese students’ sociocultural perceptions of social status during the year they studied abroad in Canada and the impact of the changes on their pragmatic use of English when offering advice. The study compared the development of 97 Japanese exchange students’ pragmatic competence with that of 102 peers in Japan who did not undertake a year abroad. Results revealed that the former group started lower in pragmatic performance than the latter but then surpassed them, suggesting that living and studying in a target speech community was effective in developing pragmatic competence.