This study examines the effectiveness of study abroad and pragmatic instruction on L2 learners' acquisition of the speech acts of requesting, thanking, and refusing. In the study, speech acts produced by L2 learners of Spanish who studied abroad for six weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina and L2 learners who received eight weeks of pragmatic instruction were analyzed and compared with a control group of learners and a control group of native speakers. In all, 44 participants completed the study. Learners and native speakers completed an oral DCT that included 9 prompts designed to elicit the speech acts under study. Native speakers completed the DCT once, while learners completed it before and after study abroad, pragmatic instruction, or regular classroom instruction, depending on which group they were in. The research questions for this study were: (1) How do L2 Spanish learners compare to native speakers with respect to the strategies they use to produce the speech acts under study? (2) How and to what extent do studying abroad and receiving explicit pragmatic instruction improve learners' production of these speech acts, and is one type of intervention more effective than the other? The results from the pretest showed that while learners used strategies that resembled native speakers' some of the time, important differences existed between all of the learner groups and the native speaker group. In the posttest, participants in the instructed group showed gains in the acquisition of some request structures, and participants in the study abroad group adopted some of the dialectal characteristics of Argentinian Spanish and increased the length of their responses so that they were producing more strategies overall. However, neither group meaningfully diverged from the L2 control group after intervention, and all three learner groups showed important differences when their responses were compared to the native speakers' responses. These results affirm that progress in the acquisition of speech acts for L2 learners of Spanish is complicated by the complexity of speech acts and how their production can vary so widely in different circumstances. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]