1 A Socio-pragmatic Exploration into the Realization of the Prefabricated Expressions Excuse me and I’m sorry by Japanese L2 Users of English Goro MURAHATA Abstract This study explores how Japanese second language (JL2) users of English distinctively realize the prefabricated English expressions Excuse me and I’m sorry in different social scenes. The inappropriate use of those functionally similar expressions has been observed in class by English teachers. However, there have been very few empirical studies which investigated how L2 users of English recognize each of these expressions as distinct by virtue of differences in functions according to various social scenes. 37 JL2 users of English were given two pencil-and-paper tasks. The results showed that the participants had rudimentary socio-pragmatic ideas related to the use of the prefabricated expressions. However, the range of functions they recognized for each of the expressions was very limited. There was also a case where they had difficulty in choosing I’m sorry for a fairly serious matter. This means that though JL2 users at the college level have minimum knowledge as to the use of prefabricated expressions, they still lack in understanding the multi-functional nature of them. It was concluded from these results that to overcome this weakness in their socio-pragmatic competence they need to have more language using experience with metapragmatic awareness in real communicative situations. 1. Introduction The Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has encouraged English teachers at all school levels to emphasize the importance of second language (L2) users’ acquiring socio-pragmatic competence which allows them to use the language appropriately according to various social contexts (MEXT, 2017). Along with such an educational context, the importance of prefabricated routines/patterns or lexical phrases, which are understood or produced as an unanalyzed chunk, not by being configurated by grammar from a scratch, has increasingly attracted much attention among applied linguists, cognitive psychologists and language teachers (Murahata, 2018; Murahata & Murahata, 2017;