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Rating EFL Learner's Interlanguag Pragmatic Competence by Native and Non-native English Speaking Teachers

Rezanejad, Atefeh | 2013

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: English
  3. Document No: 44839 (31)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Languages and Linguistics Center
  6. Advisor(s): Alemi, Minoo; Eslami Rasekh, Zohreh
  7. Abstract:
  8. Pragmatic assessment and consistency in rating are among the subject matters which are still in need of more in-depth investigations. The significance of the issue is highlighted when remembering that inconsistency in ratings would surely damage the test fairness issue in assessment and lead to much diversity in ratings. The purpose of this study was investigating the criteria that native (American) and non-native (Iranian) English speaking teachers considered while rating the pragmatic productions of Iranian EFL learners regarding the two speech acts of compliment and compliment response. Overall, a hundred and twenty teachers (sixty native and sixty non-native raters) participated in this study by filling out two WDCT speech act rating questionnaires (one on compliment and one on compliment response) prepared by the researcher. The results of the study revealed that on the whole the raters considered nine macro criteria during rating compliment and compliment response pragmatic productions. They included: “linguistic accuracy”, “politeness”, “fluency”, “feeling considerations”, “contextual issues”, “authenticity”, “strategy use”, “sincerity”, and “interlocutors’ characteristics and relationships”. Moreover, regarding the speech act of compliment, the results of the intra-class correlations showed that a significant relationship could be observed between the native and non-native raters in terms of their ratings. However, the chi-square values depicted that there was a significant difference in their criteria frequency. Moreover, the results of independent samples t-test showed that there was not a significant difference between native and non-native raters in the scores that they assigned to the productions as ratings. In addition, regarding the speech act of compliment response, it was observed that no significant difference existed between native and non-native raters based on the results from chi-squares. Besides, the results of intra-class correlations showed that there was not any significant relationship between the two groups of raters. Finally, independent t-test revealed that no significant difference could be observed between the raters in their ratings for the speech act of compliment response. It was concluded that the raters did not have consistency in their ratings and criteria. They were in fact in need of training and instruction in order to be more competent in pragmatic assessment. The results of this study have important implications for teacher trainers and teacher education textbook developers. The results can remind us of the importance of instruction on pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatics aspects of pragmatics for teachers
  9. Keywords:
  10. Pragmatic assessment ; Rating ; Speech Acts ; Compliment ; Compliment Rsponse ; Native English as a Foreign Language (EFL)Teachers ; Non-Native English as a Foreign Language (EFL)Teachers

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