pragmatic knowledge in university entrance exam for english majors

abstract pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. communicative action includes not only using speech acts (such as apologizing, complaining, complimenting, and requesting), but also engaging in different types of discourse and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity. the present study aimed to investigate the assessment of pragmatic knowledge in the entrance exam for english majors. to this end, the entrance exams from 2003 to 2012 were collected and submitted to an analysis of pragmatic knowledge. this knowledge includes ability to perform speech acts, discourse function, politeness function, non literal meaning and cultural knowledge. for the purpose of data collection, searle’s (1975) classification of speech acts for analyzing each item was used. fraser’s (1990, 1999) taxonomy of discourse markers was chosen. non literal meaning in each item was analyzed by referring to the rational and universal principles, namely cooperative principles. politeness in each item was classified based on being direct or indirect. the names, places and events that were related to the foreign cultures were classified as the subclasses of cultural knowledge. the results revealed that there were differences in the frequency of different aspects of pragmatic knowledge. it was also demonstrated that the speech act categories were used in more frequency. key words: pragmatics, entrance examination tests, interlanguage pragmatics, instruction of language pragmatics.