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With the growing acknowledgement of the importance of pragmatic competence in second language (L2) learning, language researchers have identified the comprehension of speech acts as they occur in natural conversation as essential to communicative competence (e.g. Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Thomas, 1983). Nonconventional indirect speech acts are formed in a variety of ways by native English speakers and are therefore not easily recognised by non-native English speakers (Cook & Liddicoat, 2002; Kasper, 1984). In order to investigate this aspect of pragmatic comprehension, this study compared the pragmatic awareness of low and high ability L2 learners and native English speakers by examining each group's ability to recognise indirect speech acts as they occurred in a corpus of conversations taking place in academic settings. Participants (n = 56) identified requests, suggestions, corrections, and offers with varying success. Results show that contextual knowledge and linguistic features, such as specified agent, lexical markers, false starts, and use of modals, may have interacted with speech act type to account for performance variability. This information can be used by language teachers to raise English language learners' awareness of how pragmatic meaning is conveyed.
