How Testable is Interlanguage Pragmatic Ability

The primary objective of a language test is to provide a measure that we can interpret as an indicator of an individual’s language ability’ (Bachman & Palmer, 1996, p. 23). This is also true for testing learners’ pragmatic ability or interlanguage pragmatics, which Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993, p. 3) define as ‘the study of people’s comprehension and production of linguistic action in context’. Since there have been few test development studies to date in the area of interlanguage pragmatics in comparison with the number of speech act studies carried out for research purposes, it is a cumbersome and challenging enterprise to have a thorough understanding of what is an appropriate measure of interlanguage pragmatics. There is, nevertheless, a growing interest in this area due to the indispensable role of pragmatic competence as a component of communicative competence and thus its significance in language teaching itself. To this end, the present review paper reviews the literature on interlanguage pragmatics and testing. Then, it discusses different components for testing interlanguage pragmatics and the call for both production-oriented and comprehension-oriented interlanguage pragmatics testing. Moreover, it delineates various methods or measures of testing pragmatic ability. Finally, future perspectives in testing interlanguage pragmatic ability will be presented.

Keywords:

Interlanguage Pragmatics , Pragmatics , Speech Acts