Testing of second language pragmatics: Past and future

Testing of second language pragmatic competence is an underexplored but growing area of second language assessment. Tests have focused on assessing learners ’ sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities but the speech act framework informing most current productive testing instruments in interlanguage pragmatics has been criticized for under-representing the construct. In particular, the assessment of learners ’ ability to produce extended monologic and dialogic discourse is a missing component in existing assessments. This paper reviews existing tests and argues for a discursive re-orientation of pragmatics tests. Suggestions for tasks and scoring approaches to assess discursive abilities while maintaining practicality are provided, and the problematicity of native speaker benchmarking is discussed. Keywords discourse completion test, interlanguage pragmatics, language testing, oral proficiency, role play, second language pragmatics Testing of second language pragmatics is a growing area of research and practice in L2 assessment, and 15 years after Hudson, Detmer, and Brown’s (1995) seminal study, it is time to take stock of what has been achieved and to look ahead at ways to assess the construct of L2 pragmatic competence more comprehensively. This review starts out by delineating the construct of pragmatic ability and outlining an interpretive argument and a validity argument to underpin assessment. Construct and interpretive validation argument In a broad definition, Crystal (1997) characterizes pragmatics as ‘the study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of languag