Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 4:2 (2016), 225–250. doi 10.1075/jicb.4.2.04saf issn 2212–8433 / e-issn 2212–8441 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Pragmatic functions of formulaic speech in three diferent languages A focus on early L3 learners of English María Pilar Safont Jordà and Laura Portolés Falomir Universitat Jaume I Te study examines early multilingual formulaic speech with a focus on the English classroom. We have followed a discourse-pragmatic approach in the analysis of our data, which comprises transcripts from eight 45-minute sessions. Transcripts from these sessions involved 184 participants from two diferent age ranges. In this analysis, we have considered formulas produced in three languag- es: Catalan, Spanish, and English. Our goal is to provide further evidence for the inherent dynamism and complexity of early multilingual pragmatic develop- ment, and in so doing, to acknowledge the role of the educational level and the language program adopted in the school. Findings are partly in line with (a) pre- vious studies dealing with the identifcation of pragmatic functions in the EFL classroom (Llinares & Pastrana, 2013), and (b) the peculiarities of early third language learners (Portolés, 2015). Finally, we tackle the importance of adopting multilingual perspectives in the analyses of multilingual students. Catalan and Spanish abstracts at end. Keywords: young L3 language learners, classroom discourse, pragmatic formulas, Catalan immersion program Te classroom presents a natural environment for language development which ofers children unique opportunities to learn from participation in interaction. In order to examine children’s participation in discourse, we focus on formulaic speech as one pragmatic aspect that has been widely analysed in recent decades (see Wray, 2012, 2013 for an overview). Due to this fact, a number of terms are now used to refer to similar or related pragmatic aspects. We begin by describ- ing these terms and identifying the perspective we have adopted for our analy- sis, namely that of the pragmatic functions performed by formulaic speech in the third language (L3) classroom. Given the scarcity of studies on early L3 learners’ goteborgsswe/6 IP: 130.241.16.16 On: Mon, 01 Jan 2018 06:28:44