چکیده:
Testing pragmatic competence has always posed daunting challenges to researchers and practitioners. As a step to address the gap in pragmatic testing, this paper delineates the procedural stages of developing and validating a context-sensitive Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT). Following a unitary view of validity, tenable argument and empirical evidence was accumulated to support the construct validity of the test. While 136 advanced learners of English took the developed test, it exhibited reasonable internal consistency (α= .72). Furthermore, the results of correlational studies revealed acceptable association between the scores of this MDCT with both a written version of the same test and a previously validated test of pragmatics from the literature endorsing its concurrent validity. Also, the MDCT proved efficient in differentiating between native speakers and EFL learners as suggested by the results of an independent samples t-test. Finally, a pretest-posttest experimental study with 26 intermediate EFL learners was designed to check the sensitivity of the test towards developments in learners’ interlanguage after which a t-test analysis corroborated the construct validity of the test. This array of evidence denotes that the suggested MDCT can be reliably used in EFL contexts as a valid measure of pragmatic competence.
خلاصه ماشینی:
To address this need, the present study ventures upon the development of a reliable, practical, and context appropriate pragmatics test and forms an argument in favor of its application in courses of English as a foreign language especially in cases of large-scale assessment in Iran.
This cohort, coming from nine classes, was selected based on their results on Oxford Placement Test (Allan, 1992) 64 Assessing Pragmatics through MDCTs: A Case… from a population of male and female students aged between 18 and 26 majoring in English literature at University of Tehran or in medicine at Medical School of Shahid Beheshti University and learners in Advanced levels at Iran Language Institute (The ILI).
Eventually, the scenarios for these selected situation swere adopted 65 Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies,Vol 6, No 2, 2014 and/or adapted from Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei (1998), Cohen and Olshtain (1993), Eisenstein and Bodman (1986), Eslami-Rasekh (2005, 2010), Jiang (2006), Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993), Kondo (2010), Malamed (2010), Martinez-Flor (2010), Martinez-Flor and Alcon-Soler (2007), Safont-Jorda (2004), Schauer and Adolphs (2006), and Uso-Juan (2010).
Also, by applying a partial correlation analysis, the performance of the 26 learners in the second group of the study was compared on the present MDCT and a test of pragmatic comprehension utilizing acceptability judgment tasks as its modality, whose validity was previously established in the literature by Bardovi-Harlig and DNrnyei (1998).