The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing request, apology, and refusal speech acts across intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners to identify their attitudinal ratings of their produced structures in terms of pragmatic success and (im)politeness mannerism. A discourse completion test including 2 Likert scales on attitudinal appropriatenes...

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...

Communicative alignment refers to adaptation to one’s communication partner. Temporal aspects of such alignment have been little explored. This paper examines temporal aspects of lexical and syntactic alignment (i.e. tendencies to use the interlocutor’s lexical items and syntactic structures) in task-oriented discourse. In particular, we investigate whether lexical and syntactic alignment incre...

The purpose of this study is to find a practical solution for improving writing skill among Iranian high school learners of EFL. The main question was whether pragmatics had any priority over traditional methods in improving writing or not.  Forty high school students were selected on the basis of their performance in PET (2009). In addition the following instruments were also used in this quas...

This study examines the collective use of the electronic information and communication channels and their impact on citizen participation for public discourse. Using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, we investigate public communication channels available for government service provision in a large metropolis in China. Specifically, four electronic communication channels are an...

The present study compares two measures most frequently used to assess pragmatic competence: Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCT) and Oral Discourse Completion Tasks (ODCT). The study focuses on these two speech act data collection methods and explores the validity of using different forms of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) in non-Western contexts. Twenty four Iranian university students...

Although studies on pragmatics in general and politeness in particular abound in the literature, impoliteness has been largely ignored. In the present study, participants filled out either the Persian or English version of a discourse completion test (DCT). The researchers analyzed collected answers to discover the relationship between impoliteness and power. Furthermore, the researchers compar...

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...