A Probe Into The Assessment Of Chinese College Students' Pragmatic Competence: An Interlanguage Pragmatic Approach

As a hybrid of both pragmatics and second language acquisition, interlanguage pragmatics, since its birth, has been paid more and more attention to by various researchers and scholars. Relevant researches in the past three decades can be categorized as pragmatic comprehension, production of linguistic action, pragmatic transfer and communicative effect, of which learners'pragmatic competence becomes the research focus. However, researchers'efforts are mainly devoted to the description of the nature or the state of the learners'pragmatic competence such as pragmatic transfer or pragmatic failure. Up to now, little attention has been paid to the approaches to assessing learners'pragmatic competence, especially such competence of Chinese college students, which will be the concentration of the study in this dissertation.First, this dissertation, on the basis of the literature review of communicative competence and pragmatic competence, summarizes the features of pragmatic competence of college students in China: 1) they should abide by the pragmalinguistic rules; 2) they should pay attention to the cultural differences at the sociopragmatic level; 3) if they have pragmatic competence, they have a good idea of attitudinal and behavioural knowledge at cognitive and psychological level; and 4) they should pay sufficient attention to contextual knowledge at spatial and temporal leve(l何自然,张巨文,2003). Then it holds that when defining pragmatic competence, we should take into account three dimensions: knowledge dimension, process dimension and content dimension(Roever, 2007). Therefore, this dissertation makes further analyses of such competence from two aspects: both static perspective and dynamic perspective before designing the pragmatic competence assessment questionnaire. On the static side, we believe that learners'pragmatic competence is reflected in their comprehension and recognition of pragmatic knowledge such as pragmalinguistic knowledge(PLK), sociopragmatic knowledge(SPK) and strategic knowledge to combine PLK and SPK appropriately on certain occasions. On the dynamic side, such competence is refracted in their choices of proper linguistic forms when conducting some speech acts or in their understanding of speech acts. Then, on the one hand, the author subdivides pragmatic knowledge and infuses the questionnaire with detailed pragmatic knowledge such as presupposition, indirectness of language, politeness. On the other hand, features of speech act—criticism, have been listed to provide reference for designing the assessment criterion when evaluating students'discourse completion test after we list criticizing scenarios shared by both Chinese students and their foreign counterparts where criticism takes place. Only by so doing can we guarantee content validity of the questionnaire before we assess students'pragmatic competence.In what form does the pragmatic questionnaire take? After scrutinizing and commenting on the pragmatic-competence-data-eliciting methods both at home and abroad, especially those in China in the past three decades, we find that the previous methods abroad are mainly applied in Western contexts or in Japan, and that pragmatic questionnaires in the past in China are poor in construct validity. What's more, English learners increase by leaps and bounds in China. It is urgent to find approaches to assessing their pragmatic competence in a convenient and economical way. Therefore, three approaches deployed frequently in traditional English tests----multiple choice, true-false questions and discourse completion test----are evaluated in this study by means of expert's evaluation, statistical analyses such as factor analysis, correlation analysis, structural equation modeling and think-aloud process of subjects with the conclusion that they can guarantee the construct validity of the questionnaire.We conclude that pragmatic competence can be reflected with the help of static pragmatic knowledge testing and dynamic speech act performance assessment. Learners'pragmatic competence can be assessed through such approaches as multiple choice, true-false questions and discourse completion test, approaches deployed in the traditional testing. Testing results and validity as well as reliability can be calculated with computers in an economical way. We hope that pragmatic assessment can draw both teachers'and learners'attention to linguistic forms and their special attention to the usage of such forms in certain contexts. We also hope pragmatic assessment can be a bridge between linguistic forms and their application on some occasions with the assessment wash-back to lay more emphasis on learners'online performance in their course of English learning so as to avoid"mute and dumb English"phenomena and as a result, to contribute a lot to change"more time less success"situation among English learners in China.