On the Reliability of Discourse Completion Tests in Measuring Pragmatic Competence in Foreign Language Learners

This paper focuses on the results of the research study which primarily address the issue of speech act data collection during the research project, measuring the pragmatic competence in German and English foreign language students at the Faculty of Philology, University Goce Delchev in Stip, R. Macedonia. This study was performed with a discourse completion test (DCT) and was initiated as a contrastive study of the speech acts requests, complaints and apology - data obtained by testing German and English L2 learners. We intend to analyse, based on the results of our studies, whether the results achieved from DCTs as an instrument for measuring pragmatic competence may be inappropriate for collecting data, but more research is needed to show this conclusively. These studies do make some headway and they help to underscore the fact that more work is needed to extend the scope of speech act studies and refine the methodologies used in them