This  study  examined  the  effects  of  individual  difference  (ID)  factors  on  changing  pragmatic abilities  among  L2  learners  of  English.  Participants  were  48  Japanese  EFL  students  in  an English-medium  university  in  Japan.  They  completed  a  pragmatic  speaking  test  (k=12)  that assessed  their  ability  to  produce  two  speech  acts:  requests  and  opinions,  in  hi...

Without knowing the speech act functions, it would be difficult to make correct requests in a language. Studies in pragmalinguistics have shown that conventionally direct and indirect requestive patterns are perceived differently in different speech communities. This study investigates the perception of the requestive speech acts by Persian native speakers to determine the socially appropriate ...

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...

The offer of some cake can be declined by saying “I am on a diet” – an indirect reply. Here, we asked whether certain well-established psychological and conceptual features are linked to the (in)directness speech acts issue unexplored so far. Subjects rated direct performed same critical linguistic forms in different dialogic contexts. We find that replies were understood with less certainty, p...