With the advent of today’s global economic system, we observe an increasing degree of communication across different cultures between people of different languages. In order to be successful in communication, it is essential for second language learners to know not just grammar and text organization but also pragmatic aspects of the target language (Bachman 1990)1. ‘Pragmatic competence’ can be specifically defined as “knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out, and the ability to use language appropriately according to context” (Kasper 1997).

The study of the learner language has been a growing source of concern in pragmatics in recent years. The pragmatic perspective toward the learner language led to the birth of a new interdiscipline, interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). ILP studies are concerned with language learners’ performance and acquisition of pragmatic competence in their second language. The influence of language learners’ linguistic and cultural background on their performance of linguistic action in a second language has been a focal concern in ILP. Among non-structural factors interacting with pragmatic transfer is second language proficiency, which has been found to constrain pragmatic transfer in requesting (Blum-Kulka, 1982).