L2 Pragmatics Strategies

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Suggested strategies for assessing L2 speech acts:
There are six strategies for assessing pragmatics that have been suggested by Cohen (2010):
1- Realistic situations:
Keep the speech act situations realistic (for the learner group) and engaging. So if your students are learning Japanese, you would avoid a vignette about babysitting since this is not likely to be a culturally prevalent activity in Japan since family members tend to do the babysitting. In terms of finding vignettes that are engaging, the logical approach would be to check with locals of the given speech community. But another source can be the learners themselves since they are the ones who may be acutely aware of just those situations for which they would like guidance in pragmatics. …show more content…

4- Checking for the role of subjectivity in L2 pragmatics performance:
You could have your students write or say both what they think a native-like response would be, as well as how their own L2 pragmatic performance might depart from the perceived native norms if they are unwilling to do it the way natives would.
5- Checking your learners’ rationale for their speech acts responses:
You can have your students provide a rationale for why they responded as they did in the given social situation. If the group is not too large, you could have them audio-tape or write their reactions at the time they are responding or just afterwards.
6- Determining when to assess for speech acts …show more content…

In the exemplar generation stage, the teacher asks the learners to identify and classify situations, which are applicable for them in certain speech acts.
• Stage two: The second stage is situation likelihood investigation. The teacher in this stage examines how likely it is that the situations prompted in learners’ daily life interactions.
• Stage three: the teacher conducts metapragmatic assessments. This assessment is done in order to collect learners’ perceptions of the contextual variables included in each constellation.
• Stage four: the fourth stage is to pilot the situations of the test. This stage should be conducted in order to validate the scenarios used to elicit learners’ speech act production and to obtain preliminary data to construct each constellation of the WDCT.
• Finally, the teacher develops the constellation of the WDCT. In this stage, the teacher analyses the data collected from the situational pilot test. After analyzing the result and developing the test, it is suggested that the developed test is piloted again to another group of learners so that the test will have a good quality in terms of validity, reliability, practicality, and

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