The impact of a short-term SA on the acquisition of sociopragmatic variation patterns

Abstract Situated in the under-researched area of second language (L2) sociopragmatic development, this paper focuses on a cohort of 18 university-level L2 learners of Russian to explore the impact of face-to-face oral language contact during an eight-week sojourn on the realization of nominal address terms (NATs). It achieves this by means of (1) a mixed methods reflexive questionnaire and (2) a pre/post written discourse completion task. Although results indicate that language contact was dominated by interactions with teachers regarding classroom matters, statistically significant gains in the number of NATs used were noted. However, the diversity of NATs employed and their convergence with socially appropriate norms did not significantly develop. We conclude that even a short-term SA with limited diversity of interaction can lead to sociopragmatic gains not evident in the at-home environment. Nevertheless, the time span and its impact on opportunities for diverse and intense contact was not conducive to the activation of a wider range of variants especially those indexing social closeness.