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 suppor...

Alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. These approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996). The present study tries to ex...

The present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. Most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native English speaking students’ (NNESs) pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native English speaking students (NESs) and compared learners ...

With the aim of more emphasis on pragmatics and its inclusion in EFL classrooms, this study attempted to investigate the effectiveness of obtrusive and unobtrusive focus on form instructions on learners’ pragmatic performance of criticizing in English. 54 Iranian learners, all at intermediate level, participated in this study, and they were divided into three groups: 19 participants receiving o...

according to utility theory, people should not allow the _____ of a choice to affect people seem not to have pragmatic reasoning schemata that apply. ical evidence for pragmatic reasoning schema theory comes from performance ory, pragmatic reasoning schemas are abstracted from everyday experience. parts of Cheng and Holyoak's pragmatic reasoning schemas are those about people. However, Cosmides...

The literature investigating the notion of presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) has mainly been dubbed as being semantic (Simons 2003). This paper investigates the linguistic application of pragmatic-based constraints to the ‘semantic’ notion of presupposition in DRT. By applying pragmatic-based constraints to presuppositional phenomenon, we aim to defend DRT against the accu...

Aim of the present study is the validation of a series of predictions concerning the ability to comprehend different pragmatic phenomena expressed through linguistic or gestural means. According to the Cognitive Pragmatics Theory, it exists a gradation of difficulty in the comprehension of different pragmatic phenomena, depending upon the complexity of the mental representations involved; furth...

We aimed to disentangle contributions of socio-pragmatic and structural language deficits to narrative competence by comparing the narratives of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 25), non-autistic children with language impairments (LI; n = 23), and children with typical development (TD; n = 27). Groups were matched for age (6½ to 15 years; mean: 10;6) and non-verbal ability; ASD...