Indirect reporting. The role of the sentence structure in indirect reporting by L2 speakers

Currently research into indirect reporting in bilingual speech production is considered important because: a) indirect reporting involves work of cognitive, pragmatic and linguistic mechanisms in L2 speaker, thus reveals different mechanisms of language acquisition; b) indirect reporting is considered to be one of the most challenging tasks for L2 speakers; c) understanding of these obstacles could enable L2 teachers to foster language proficiency skills in L2 learners more effectively. There is a growing body of literature that looks into the relationship between the original utterance and the report, logical and inferential structure of indirect reports, the role of semantic and pragmatic factors in shaping indirect reports. Most of the studies have been based on examples and data in the English language, where subjects of research were bilinguals with the English language as L2 and various mother tongues L1. The central thesis of this paper is that L2 learners tend to overcomplicate the structure of a sentence in indirect reporting. This study therefore set out to assess the structure of indirect reports by bilingual speakers and determine possible reasons for overcomplicating of sentence structure. In addition, this study provides an opportunity to advance our knowledge of L2 acquisition