What is Second Language (L2) Pragmatics

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the strategies used to apologize by Spanish-speaking students who engaged in a telecollaboration project with their English-speaking counterparts. The data were collected from synchronous Zoom sessions where students carried out open role-playing tasks to elicit their use of apologies, which were analyzed through quantitative content analysis. The results showed that apart from the strategies classified according to the proposed taxonomy, some learners also used other strategies which did not fit in any of the categories proposed. It is believed that those strategies were transferred from the students' L1. The findings showed that the most frequent L1 strategy was “I hope that you understand,” which is not usually employed by L1 speakers of English after an apology. Nevertheless, a general pattern to apologize was not found in the data collected, but rather three different sub-patterns were identified.