Assessment of EFL pragmatic production and perception using video prompts

This study describes an investigation of the development of EFL learners' pragmatic production and perception of the speech acts of requests, refusals, and apologies using video prompts, which were part of a computerized data collection instrument. These three face-threatening acts were chosen because of their importance and difficulty for non-native speakers of English. Forty-eight Japanese learners of English took part in this study. The results showed that pragmatic production develops hand in hand with overall English proficiency to some extent, whereas pragmatic perception is relatively independent of proficiency. This trend was consistent across the three speech acts, across two imposition levels, as well as in a variety of situations. A correlation analysis suggested that the learners' production and perception may be dependent upon different speech acts. Among possible explanations for the phenomena were the learners' linguistic constraints, the transfer of L1 pragmatic knowledge, and the learners' beliefs about L2 pragmatic rules. Neither production nor perception had developed fully from the perspective of the native speaker judges, probably because of the paucity of input containing these speech acts in the Japanese EFL context. These results suggest that EFL learners need opportunities to receive input containing English speech acts and to practice both perceiving and producing speech acts in order to be pragmatically competent in L2 English. The low level of pragmatic development also suggested that the inclusion of lower proficiency learners is important when investigating EFL learners' pragmatic abilities. In terms of the research methodology, the use of the video-prompted computerized procedure and the use of oral data proved to be useful.; In a supplementary analysis of the construct validity of the instruments with 107 Japanese learners of English, a principal component analysis showed that while the context-internal parameters for apologies and requests showed a one component solution, which supported previous research findings, the context-internal parameters for refusals appeared to be made up of two different constructs: the speaker-related component and the recipient-related component.; In sum, this study addresses several important issues in the investigation of learners' speech acts, and issues in the teaching of pragmatic competence in EFL contexts.