Chapter 13 - Indicators for pragmatic instruction: Some quantitative tools

Summary

Introduction

With ever-increasing attention to the study of the development and use of pragmatics in a second language, there has arisen a concomitant interest in developing appropriate and valid means for the assessment of pragmatic competence. Although there are established methods for assessing other factors of language production, similar instruments have not yet been developed for the assessment of pragmatics. This chapter will discuss three methods of assessing pragmatic production by Japanese learners of English as a second language. Although the full study involved developing a number of different instruments for assessing pragmatics, only three instruments will be examined here: the written discourse completion test, language lab discourse completion test tape recordings, and role-play of scenarios. These were the instruments that required language production by the examinees, and it was felt that these would provide the most information regarding pedagogical applications of language samples obtained through pragmatic assessment.

A brief review of the project

The initial stage of this project (Hudson, Detmer, & Brown, 1992) involved identifying the nature of the instruments to be used and then determining the variables to be examined. A primary purpose of the study was to examine whether the variables could be used to explain variation in pragmatic performance. The processes of determining the variables were iterative in nature, involving literature reviews and pilot testing of the instruments on small samples of informants. In order to utilize the speech acts most generally researched to date, the speech acts of requests, refusals, and apologies were selected as the speech acts to be investigated.