Measuring L2 oral pragmatic abilities for use in social contexts: development and validation of an assessment instrument for L2 pragmatics performance in university settings
Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This study describes the development and validation of an assessment instrument of L2 oral pragmatics for university activities in English-medium contexts.Assessment of L2 pragmatics has been developed by conceptualizing the test construct as well as discussing task formats.Traditionally, the focus of pragmatics has been on offline knowledge of speech acts isolated from interaction.Recent research efforts to perspectives.Integrating L2 speakers' extended discourse performances and assessing a broader construct of pragmatics should be desirable as L2 speakers' task performances elicited by communicative tasks allows for a broader conclusion of their pragmatic abilities, a stronger extrapolation of the task performances to reality, and most of all, richer information for test users (e.g., teachers and learners).A serious problem with this testing method, however, is that it negatively impacts instrument practicality.Despite its strengths, the discursive approach increases resource intensity and would consequently threaten instrument practicality, which hinders its utilization.Few implications have been provided for practicality of discursively-orientated tests of L2 pragmatics in order to reduce resource-intensiveness (e.g., costs for hiring role play conductors) while avoiding construct under-representation (Messick, 1989).Only two studies (Roever, et al., 2014;Youn, 2013) in testing of L2 pragmatics have attempted extensive validation in an argument-based framework (Chapelle, 2008;Kane, 2006;Knoch & Elder, 2013).The argument-based approach to validation allowed these two studies to structure an argument to draw a conclusion and to logically demonstrate the extent to which, and how the conclusion was supported, rather than investigating and reporting different types of evidence (e.g., inter-rater reliability) separately and unsystematically.These two studies (Roever, et al., 2014;Youn, 2013) were methodologically not identical, and therefore the range and the types of validity evidence that was evaluated, their strengths and shortcomings, were different.As Roever et al. (2014) pointed out, testing of L2 pragmatics has remained in the development stage for three decades and almost none of the pragmatic tests has been used in practice, although pragmatics is recognized as vital for successful communication in real life.However, the recent discursive approach to testing of L2
Author: Naoki Ikeda
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2778527783