Assessing Pragmatic Skills in Speech Act Production and Perception

Introduction1

Pragmatic skills can be defined as the ability to encode and decode meanings and intentions, including implicit ones, in ways that are relevant and appropriate to the linguistic, situational and cultural context in which interaction takes place (e.g., Bachman, 1990). They comprise knowing which verbal and non-verbal resources to use for given communicative purposes (pragmalinguistics) and knowing when to use them so that they fit participants’ needs, goals and constraints (sociopragmatics); (Leech, 1983). They are a form of procedural knowledge (i.e., knowing “how-to-say-what-to-whom-when”; Bardovi-Harlig, 2013, p. 68) thanks to which communication participants can predict and affect their interlocutors’ emotional, cognitive and behavioural reactions, but also manage the impression they give of themselves, and successfully participate in transactional and interpersonal exchanges. Such language use is crucial to communication, showing how adequate we are as social interactants in real-life events (Bachman, 1990; Canale & Swain, 1980; Hymes, 1972). When we are not effective or appropriate, communication breakdown or social friction may occur (Thomas, 1983).

However, difficulties emerge in a language other than one’s native one (L2), whether this is a second language (i.e., one spoken in the community where one lives but is not one’s native language), or a foreign language (i.e., one which is only the object of instruction/learning, but is not used in one’s community). In such cases, pragmatic skills do not develop spontaneously or easily, and anyway more slowly than other skills (e.g., Hacking, 2008; Schmidt, 1993; Taguchi, 2011b; Thomas, 1983), often because they require familiarity with unwritten rules of interactional conduct that speakers of a native language (L1) are gradually socialized into. This calls for instruction in pragmatics (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2001), which is reported to be of use to learners (e.g., Eslami & Eslami-Rasekh, 2008), although not always with stable long-term effects (e.g., Koike & Pearson, 2005).

Pragmatics instruction in the L2 has consequently stimulated research in the assessment of pragmatic skills (e.g., Roever, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2011). This research domain is still developing (Sydorenko et al., 2014, p. 20), especially with regard to the applicability of its findings to the classroom (e.g., Ishihara, 2009). To appreciate the import, insights, and pedagogical relevance of research into pragmatic skills assessment, it is necessary to compare and contrast the studies conducted in this domain, describing them systematically with respect to the same properties. Such a study is necessary both to determine how far research has progressed in this area and to identify both knowledge gaps and fruitful lines of development.

This paper takes stock of pragmatic skills assessment research, illustrating how comprehensive, and thus inclusive, it is in its methods, objects of investigation and relevance to stakeholders. The focus is on speech acts – the interpersonal-transactional actions performed (almost) exclusively through language (e.g., thanking, offering, apologising, requesting) – which are a prototypical manifestation of communicative proficiency.1 As far as we know, reviews have been carried out in related areas, but not this one, namely: the assessment of pragmatic skills among children with communication impairments/disorders (e.g., Adams, 2002; Hatton, 1998; Toe et al., 2019), the development of pragmatic skills relevant to a single communicative function (e.g., Eskin, 2017; Hosseini & Rezvani, 2018) or a specific context (e.g., Xiao, 2015) or a specific group of learners (e.g., Timpe-Laughlin, 2017). However, two reviews – by Tsutagawa (2015), and Timpe-Laughlin et al. (2015) – are comparable to ours, since they define theoretical constructs – i.e., pragmatic knowledge and ability vs pragmatic competence, respectively – just as we describe what is involved in the assessment of pragmatic skills.