An analysis of various pragmatic aspects of the English of advanced German learners in their face-to-face interaction with native speakers of English, intended to extract mistakes and learner-specific characteristics and to explain them in terms of hypotheses concerning their psycholinguistic, learning- and communication-contextual properties. Among the pragmatic phenomena described are: initiating and responding speech acts, gambits, opening and closing turns. The explanatory concepts include: native language transfer, generalization, functional reduction, inferencing, discourse induction, learning induction.