| This study investigated differences among test formats for measuring the cross-cultural pragmatic competence of English speaking learners of Japanese. A total of six direct and indirect, and open-response and selected-response, type tests were used to gather data from forty-seven North American English speaking learners of Japanese as a second or foreign language. Various statistical procedures (including descriptive statistics, internal consistency reliability estimates, inter-rater reliability, and intra-class correlation coefficients, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients, a factor analysis, a two-way MANOVA, and univariate follow-up statistics) were applied to investigate the reliability and validity of each test. The Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test had many problems, but the other five tests (i.e., the Self-Assessment, the Language Lab Oral Production test, the Open Discourse Completion Test, the Roleplay test, the Roleplay-Self-Assessment test) were found to be highly reliable and reasonably valid. In addition, the results indicate that, with a few minor adjustments, the translated versions of measures of cross-cultural pragmatics developed originally in English by Hudson, Detmer, and Brown (1992, 1995) for testing cross-cultural pragmatics of learners of ESL can also be used with English speaking populations who are studying Japanese language.;Moreover, the participants' length of exposure to the target culture was found to be related to performance on the two oral production pragmatics tests. The levels of proficiency of the participants also appear to be associated with the three pragmatics productive language tests. Practicality is also discussed from various perspectives. |
