For a number of years, there has been interest in measuring sociocultural competence (Ervin‐Tripp 1972, Hymes 1974, Canale and Swain 1980). This study focuses on one important aspect of such competence: the ability to use the appropriate sociocultural rules of speaking, by reacting in a culturally acceptable way in context and by choosing stylistically appropriate forms for that context. We chose to look at productive performance in sociocultural aspects of speaking, focusing on the speech act of “apology.” The research question that prompted this study was, “Can a rating scale be developed for assessing sociocultural competence?”
The subjects were 32 native Hebrew speakers, 20 of whom served as informants for apologies in English LZ and 12 as informants in Hebrew LI, and 12 Americans who served as informants in English LI. These subjects were asked to role‐play their responses in eight situations in which an apology was expected.
The findings show that it is possible to identify culturally and stylistically inappropriate L2 utterances in apology situations. The authors feel, however, that the results so far provide at best a crude measure of sociocultural competence and that further work with this speech act and with others is called for.
This study describes the reading and test‐taking strategies that test takers used in the Reading section of the LanguEdge courseware (ETS, 2002a). These materials were developed to familiarize prospective respondents with the new TOEFL®. The investigation focused on strategies used to respond to more traditional single selection multiple‐choice formats (i.e., Basic Comprehension and Inferencing questions) and the new selected‐response (multiple selection, drag and drop) Reading to Learn items. The latter were designed to simulate the academic task of forming a comprehensive and coherent representation of an entire text, rather than focusing on discrete points in the text. Verbal report data were collected from 32 students, representing four language groups (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Other) doing the Reading section tasks from the LanguEdge courseware materials. Students were randomly assigned to two of the six reading subtests, each consisting of a 600–700 word text with 12–13 items. Subjects' verbal report accompanying items representing each of the ten item types was evaluated to determine strategy use. The findings provide insights into the response behaviors prompted by the reading tasks on the new TOEFL.
Descriptions are now available of the speech act realizations of native speakers in given situations and of expected deviations from these patterns in the speech of nonnative speakers. Still largely lacking is a description of the processes involved in the production of these speech act utterances. This paper reports a study describing ways in which nonnative speakers assess, plan, and execute such utterances. The subjects, 15 advanced English foreign language learners, were given six speech act situations (two apologies, two complaints, and two requests) in which they were to role play along with a native speaker. Retrospective verbal report protocols were analyzed with regard to processing strategies in speech act formulation. The study found that in executing speech act behavior, half of the time respondents conducted only a general assessment of the utterances called for in the situation without planning specific vocabulary and grammatical structures, often thought in two languages and sometimes in three when planning and executing speech act utterances, utilized a series of different strategies in searching for language forms, and did not attend much to grammar or pronunciation. In an effort to characterize the speech production of the respondents in the study, three different styles seemed to appear: metacognizers, avoiders, and pragmatists.
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