Pragmatic ability and proficiency in Japanese learners of English

This study investigated the relationship between pragmatic ability and proficiency in 16 Japanese learners of English. Two measures of pragmatic ability were developed: a multiple-choice questionnaire designed to probe pragmatic awareness of various speech acts and a set of oral role-plays designed to elicit two requests, two apologies and one refusal. These measures were also administered to eight native speakers in order to establish a scoring system for the pragmatic awareness test and target norms for the role-plays. A background questionnaire was given to all participants while a proficiency test, Combined English Language Skills Assessment in a Reading Context, or CELSA was administered only to the Japanese participants.The findings in this study demonstrated that there was not a strong relationship between proficiency and pragmatic ability, nor was there one between pragmatic awareness and production. The measures were moderately correlated but they also exhibited a great deal of variation from learner to learner.Certain linguistic abilities were observed to be valuable regarding pragmatic ability, such as being able to make conventionally indirect requests. Learners were more direct in their speech acts than native speakers. They also used fewer and less varied strategies and lexical modification, with the exception of the politeness marker, please, which they over-used.There was evidence both in terms of the pragmatic awareness measure and in the analysis of the production that over-directness decreased with increasing proficiency. The two assessment instruments produced different kinds of errors at different levels of proficiency, pointing to the possibility that they were tapping the abilities associated with pragmatic awareness and production at different stages of development.This research has implications for both testing and teaching pragmatic ability