Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 124

The concept of pragmatics is far reaching and is commonly understood to focus on language use in social contexts (Crystal, 1997). Subareas include deixis, implicature, speech acts, and extended discourse (Mey, 2001). In the second language area, pragmatics is represented in major models of communicative competence (Canale & Swain, 1980; Canale, 1983; Bachman & Palmer, 1996), which inform second language assessment, but it has not been systematically assessed in large language tests. However, assessments have been developed for research purposes, and they follow either a speech act approach, or an interactional approach, leading to the coexistence of two distinct assessment constructs.

Assessments situated within a speech act approach are informed by speech act pragmatics (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1976; Leech, 1983) and, to a lesser extent, work on implicature (Grice, 1975). Following Leech (1983), these assessments consider pragmatic ability as consisting of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge and ability for use. Sociopragmatics relates to social rules, whereas pragmalinguistics covers the linguistic tools necessary to express speech intentions. In language testing, the conceptualization of pragmatic competence outlined by Timpe Laughlin, Wain, and Schmidgall (2015) is situated within this approach.

Assessments following an interactional approach are usually informed by the construct of interactional competence (Kramsch, 1986; Young, 2008; Galaczi & Taylor, 2018), which in turn heavily relies on conversation analysis (CA) (for overviews, see Schegloff, 2007; Clift, 2016). Interactional competence is the ability to engage in extended interaction as a listener and speaker, including display of recipiency of interlocutor talk, turn taking, repair, sequence organization, turn formation, as well as the configuration of these generic features of talk for the enactment of social roles in specific contexts (Hall & Pekarek Doehler, 2011). Galaczi and Taylor (2018) describe this approach from a language testing perspective.

Assessment instruments in second language (L2) pragmatics do not usually cover all possible subareas of pragmatics but rather focus on sociopragmatics, pragmalinguistics, or interactional competence. While testing of L2 pragmatics is not (yet) a component of large‐scale proficiency tests, some interactional abilities are assessed as part of such tests as part of the speaking construct (Galaczi, 2014), and implicature as part of the listening construct, e.g., in Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) (Wang, Eignor, & Enright, 2008).