This study examined how motivation for learning English, the amount of contact with English, and  length  of  residence  in  the  target language area affects Korean graduate students’ English pragmatic skills. The study attempted to account for differential pragmatic development among 50  graduate-level  Korean  students  in  relation  to  individual  factors  mentioned  above.  The  data were...

This study investigated the effects of a 16-week reading instruction program with discourse structure graphic organizers (DSGOs) on the development of English reading comprehension among college-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. A total of 340 first and third semester students of non-English majors at a Chinese university participated in this study. A DSGO completion test and ...

this paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the persian native speakers. 200 persian respondents took a 24-item discourse completion task (dct) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenting exchanges they either observed or participated i...

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...