Constructing a Scale to Assess L2 Written Speech Act Performance: WDCT and E-mail Tasks

Chen, Yuan-shan; Liu, Jianda

doi:10.1080/15434303.2016.1213844

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Finally, to be more precise in scoring written speech act performance of the learners, Chen and Liu (2016) carried out a study with the major purpose of developing a scale to evaluate the speech act performance. To this end, they carried out a qualitative analysis of the comments provided by American raters on learners' scripts who responded some apology and request written discourse completion task situations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparative study of the effect of teacher’s group and individual feedback on Iranian EFL learners’ learning of speech acts in apology letter writing

Pourmousavi

Zenouzagh

2020

Asian. J. Second. Foreign. Lang. Educ.

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The linguistic scrutiny of any aspect of pragmatics is bound to considering carefully the context in which it is expressed. This becomes very glaring when the utterances that constitute discourse are viewed as performing social actions. In an EFL context like Iran, English language learners are in urgent need of raising their pragmatic awareness as they do not have regular access to an environment where the main language of communication is English. The major context for improving their pragmatic competence could be classroom. Thus, teachers need to cope with this issue which makes knowledge of speech acts more worthy of being dealt with. This research was an attempt to find out the effect of teacher's group feedback versus individual feedback on Iranian EFL learners' uptake of speech acts. To carry out the study, 32 pre-intermediate learners were chosen to take part based on convenient sampling through non-random grouping. To make sure that the learners were homogeneous, a Quick Placement Test (QPT) was administered before the treatment. Based on the design of the study, the learners were divided into two treatment conditions of individual and group feedback. The research was a quasi-experimental a pretest and a posttest of writing before and after the treatment to measure students' uptake of speech acts. Results of two paired-samples t-test and an independent samples t-test showed significant effect of individual feedback on learners' uptake of speech acts, while group feedback was not significant. It was also found that there was a significant difference between the effects of teacher feedback in groups vs. teacher feedback given to individual learners. The present research has significant implications. Tests can also focus more on promoting individual feedback among learners and teachers in washback effect. Teachers can also make principled decisions about the feedback condition that best boost leaner uptake in speech act.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparative study of the effect of teacher’s group and individual feedback on Iranian EFL learners’ learning of speech acts in apology letter writing

Pourmousavi

Zenouzagh

2020

Asian. J. Second. Foreign. Lang. Educ.

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“…Each participant's oral response to each item was firstly transcribed and their written responses were independently rated for pragmatic appropriateness by two native speakers of American English, both of whom were experienced English instructors at the university. A holistic five-point scale was adopted from the five-level rating scale constructed to evaluate Chinese EFL's written speech act performance by Chen and Liu (2016). Inter-rater reliability, assessed using Spearman's rank correlation, reached 0.823 (p < 0.001).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The difficulty of oral speech act production tasks in second language pragmatics testing

Huang

Lu²

2023

Front. Psychol.

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This study examined the relative difficulty of oral speech act production tasks involving eight different types of speech acts for Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners and the effects of three contextual variables, namely, power, social distance, and imposition, on such difficulty. Eight Oral Discourse Completion Task items, each representing a unique combination of the three contextual variables, were designed for each speech act. Eighty Chinese EFL learners responded to these items and their responses were rated for appropriateness by two native-speaking college English instructors. A Many-facet Rasch Measurement analysis suggested that the eight speech acts can be ordered by ascending difficulty as follows: Thank, Request, Suggestion, Disagreement, Invitation, Refusal, Offer, and Apology. Significant effects on performance scores were found for the interaction between each of the three contextual variables and speech act, and the specific effects observed varied by speech act. The implications of our findings for L2 pragmatics testing are discussed.

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“…Therefore, macroscopic and microscopic perspectives can be supplements for each other to guarantee appropriate coverage of attributes. Extracting textual attributes from teachers' TAP comments on sample summaries, as the second source, has echoes in many studies (Chen & Liu, 2016;Jeffrey, 2015;Turner & Upshur, 1996) because individual teachers view students' summary writing from different perspectives, some of which might overlap but others of which could be put together, thus broadening the coverage of attributes. Jeffrey (2015) proposed the value of teachers' verbal comments on students' performance rather than the written ones in the present study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Establishing an Operational Model of Rating Scale Construction for English Writing Assessment

Wu¹

2021

ELT

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Rating scales for writing assessment are critical in that they determine directly the quality and fairness of such performance tests. However, in many EFL contexts, rating scales are made, to certain extent, based on the intuition of teachers who strongly need a feasible and scientific route to guide their construction of rating scales. This study aims to design an operational model of rating scale construction with English summary writing as an example. Altogether 325 university English teachers, 4 experts in language assessment and 60 English majors in China participated in the study. 20 textual attributes were extracted, through text analysis, from China’s Standards of English Language Ability (CSE), theoretical construct of summary writing, comments on sample summary writing essays from 8 English teachers and their personal judgement. The textual attributes were then investigated through a large-scale questionnaire survey. Exploratory factor analysis and expert judgement were employed to determine rating scale dimensions. Regression analysis and expert judgement were conducted to determine the weighting distribution across all dimensions. Based on such endeavors, a tentative operational model of rating scale construction was established, which can also be applied and adapted to develop rating scales in other writing assessment. 

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Constructing a Scale to Assess L2 Written Speech Act Performance: WDCT and E-mail Tasks

Cited by 17 publications

References 39 publications

A comparative study of the effect of teacher’s group and individual feedback on Iranian EFL learners’ learning of speech acts in apology letter writing

A comparative study of the effect of teacher’s group and individual feedback on Iranian EFL learners’ learning of speech acts in apology letter writing

The difficulty of oral speech act production tasks in second language pragmatics testing

Establishing an Operational Model of Rating Scale Construction for English Writing Assessment

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