Testing of second language pragmatics: Past and future

Abstract

Testing of second language pragmatic competence is an underexplored but growing area of second language assessment. Tests have focused on assessing learners' sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities but the speech act framework informing most current productive testing instruments in interlanguage pragmatics has been criticized for under-representing the construct. In particular, the assessment of learners' ability to produce extended monologic and dialogic discourse is a missing component in existing assessments. This paper reviews existing tests and argues for a discursive reorientation of pragmatics tests. Suggestions for tasks and scoring approaches to assess discursive abilities while maintaining practicality are provided, and the problematicity of native speaker benchmarking is discussed.

Identificación de Errores Pragmáticos en un Test Adaptativo de Inglés como Lengua Extranjera

“…Así pues, su sistematización continúa siendo muy complicada. Hemos de destacar que se han estudiado aspectos aislados de esta competencia dentro de la tradición de la teoría de los actos de habla (Austin, 1962;Searle, 1969) y de la cortesía (Brown y Levinson, 1987) a excepción de las pruebas de Walters (2007) y de Roever (2006Roever ( , 2011, como indica éste último investigador:…”

Complaint sequences across proficiency levels: the contribution of pragmatics and multimodality

“…On the other hand, Kasper and Roever (2005) classify the different research methods into the following categories: (1) observational data of spoken interaction involving authentic discourse; elicited conversation and role-plays; (2) questionnaires including written discourse completion tasks/tests (DCTs) and multiple choice questionnaires; (3) rating scales; (4) oral and narrative forms of selfreport; (5) diaries; and (6) verbal protocols. Among all these different research methods, role-plays and DCTs seem to be the most widely employed in the field of ILP (Félix-Brasdefer, 2010;Roever, 2011).…”

“…Kasper, 2000;Félix-Brasdefer, 2010). In designing role-play tasks, it is necessary to account for contextual variables involving, p. power, social distance, and rank of imposition or severity of offence (Brown andLevinson, 1987, 1987), which could have an effect on the performance (Kasper and Dahl, 1991;Kasper, 2000;Roever, 2011). The different contextual variables can be combined so that various roles can be elaborated.…”

“…high, equal and low) and rank of imposition or severity of offence (i.e. high and low) (Roever, 2011 (Trosborg, 1995). Other aspects to take into account when designing role-play tasks are the representativeness of the contexts (Hudson, Detmer and Brown, 1995), since participants should be presented with situations that show known contexts, and whether the situations designed are socio-culturally appropriate for the target group (Beltrán-Palanques, 2013).…”

“…In addition to this, data gathered by means of role-plays might also reveal evidence of participants' active listening, backchannel signals, and nonverbal language over the course of the interaction. Nevertheless, it is important to note that although role-plays provide simulated data that is elicited under specific circumstances, and therefore the data might vary from that gathered in natural contexts (Kasper, 2000;Golato, 2003), the data collected might, to some extent, provide features of spoken data that resemble authentic spoken discourse (Kasper and Dahl, 1991;Kasper, 2000;Roever and Kasper, 2005;Félix-Brasdefer, 2007Roever, 2011). Furthermore, role-play tasks can be replicated (Kasper and Dahl, 1991), thereby allowing the collection of data from several participants.…”