The present study presents the results of a longitudinal investigation into the development of ESL learners' pragmatic awareness and productive pragmatic competence. The data for the examination of pragmatic awareness were elicited with Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei's (1998) video-and-questionnaire instrument as well as semi-structured qualitiative interviews. The data for the investigation of learners' productive pragmatic skills were collected with the Multimedia Elicitation Task that had been specifically developed for the present study.
Sixteen ESL learners provided the data for the examination of the learners' development concerning pragmatic awareness and 12 ESL learners provided the data for the investigation of learners' productive pragmatic proficiency. All ESL learners were German native speakers who spent one academic year at a British university. In addition, control data were collected from 31 German learners of English in Germany (17 participated in the awareness study and 14 in the productive one) and 22 English native speakers (20 participated in the awareness study and 15 in the productive one).
The results of the investigation of pragmatic awareness showed that the ESL learners significantly increased their pragmatic awareness during their stay in the L2 context, since they detected more pragmatic infelicities at the end of their sojourn in England than at the beginning. The results of the study into the participants' productive pragmatic competence revealed that the ESL learners' increased their productive pragmatic repertoire by acquiring various Request Strategies and Internal and External Modifiers during their stay. The results of the investigations indicate that two factors in particular seem to play an important role in learners' pragmatic development: temporal patterning and individual learner variation.