Pragmatic Development in a Foreign Setting by Indonesian Learners of English: Evidence from Non Pedagogical Intervention* 1 Agus Wijayanto& Malikatul Laila Prodi. Pendidikan Bhs. Inggris, Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta Email: agus_wijayanto@ums.ac.id Abstract Pragmatic acquisition in foreign settings is commonly enhanced by pedagogical intervention through explicit and implicit pragmatic teaching. This present study however explores pragmatic development in non pedagogical intervention setting in which Indonesian learners of English learn L2 (English) pragmatic aspects via independent implicit learning. The focus of the investigation is the development of direct and indirectness strategies of complaint. The data of the research was elicited through oral discourse completion tasks completed by the English learners in 2012. The same tasks were completed by the same English learners a year afterwards. The data obtained in 2012 and 2013 were then compared so as to observe any possible pragmatic development. Overall the findings indicated some development of direct and indirectness strategies. Nevertheless although an indication to use more indirect strategies was observed, it covered less than half of the research participants' strategies. Besides, each individual had complicated patterns of development. This research suggests that L2 pragmatics can develop in a foreign country setting but without pedagogical intervention the development cannot occur similarly to all language learners. Keywords: pragmatic development, interlanguage pragmatics, complaint, hedging, indirectness, pragmatic instruction, implicit learning 1. Background Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) is a relatively new branch of second language acquisition research which investigates how second or foreign language learners understand and perform linguistic action in a target language and how they acquire L2 pragmatic knowledge (Kasper, 1992). ILP involves two broad domains—the study of second language use examining how language learners comprehend and produce target language action, and the study of second language learning investigating the ways language learners develop their competence to understand and perform target language action (Kasper and Rose, 2002). As the study of second language use ILP concerns the most important aspect of communicative competence, the knowledge of how interlocutors produce utterances to communicate intentions and recognizes intended intention conveyed by other speakers. In the last two decades this area has become a new focus of exploration. To date for the last decade a number of ILP studies have begun to explore L2 pragmatic development by examining the effects of pedagogical intervention on the development of some aspects of pragmatic competence. They have claimed the efficacies of pragmatic instruction through explicit or implicit methods to L2 pragmatic development. For example some studies provided empirical evidence that explicit instruction was beneficial for developing various aspects of L2 pragmatics, e.g. learners‘ use of discourse markers (House, 1996), target pragmatic norms (Liddicoat and Crozet, 2001), L2 speech act strategies (Rose and Kwai-Fun, 2001), pragmatic routines (Tateyama, 2001), and metapragmatic knowledge (Takahashi, 2001). Others reported learners could benefit from both explicit and implicit instruction similarly (House, 1996; Soler, 2005), and both types of instruction provided varying effects on learners‘ pragmatic performance when they were combined with teachers‘ feedback (Koike and Pearson, 2005). ILP studies on pragmatic acquisition involving non-pedagogical intervention or implicit 1 This paper was presented at 1st COLALITE: Conference on Language, Linguistics and Literature, Jendral Soedirman University, Purwokerto- Indonesia, 9 November 2013