Siegal (1995) also carried out a study of the acquisition of sociolinguistic
competence by English L1 learners of Japanese. As in the Marriott
study, the very important politeness forms in Japanese were studied.
Siegal focused on individual differences in relation to the acquisition of
sociolinguistic competence. She studied two individual women learners
and their everyday encounters during their stay abroad in Japan. The two
speakers studied were Western upper-middle-class women, older than the
adolescent speakers in the Marriott study, and they were advanced learners,
as opposed to the low-proficiency learners of the Marriott study. Seven
types of data were collected and a discourse analysis approach was used in
the analysis of the speakers’ interaction with natives in Japan.
The research questions posed were:
— what was it like for these women to use honorific language?
— what choices the speakers made on what kind of language depending
on how they saw their presentation of themselves.