A sizeable body of research into instructed pragmatics roots from the noticing hypothesis: comparing im- plicit and explicit instruction. It is only recently that other theories, including the output hypothesis, have been researched as possible explanations of interlanguage pragmatic development. Pursuing the same line of research, the present study addressed the impact of collaborative o...

Among the most innovative features of the TOEFL® Internet-based test (TOEFL iBT) are the addition of a speaking measure and a revised writing measure consisting of two writing tasks. The speaking and writing measures include both independent and integrated tasks. Independent tasks require test takers to talk or write about their personal opinions or experiences. Integrated tasks require the use...

This paper presents warped discrete cosine transform (WDCT)-based low bit-rate block coding using image downsampling.While WDCT aims to improve the performance of conventional DCT by frequency warping, the WDCT has only been applicable to high bit-rate coding applications because of the overhead required to define the parameters of the warping filter. Recently, low bit-rate block coding based o...

Alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. These approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996). The present study tries to ex...

Testing pragmatic competence has always posed daunting challenges to researchers and practitioners. As a step to address the gap in pragmatic testing, this paper delineates the procedural stages of developing and validating a context-sensitive Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT). Following a unitary view of validity, tenable argument and empirical evidence was accumulated to suppor...