ESL EFL Writing Tests

The Pragmatic Test

John W Oller Jr. (1979) discusses pragmatic tests and criticizes the discrete point tests at length and offers an alternative in the form of pragmatic tests and suggests ways of constructing, administering and scoring pragmatic tests.  To understand his concepts it is necessary to get a clear picture of his views on language proficiency, expectancy grammar and pragmatics.

a.         Pragmatic Tests & Language Proficiency

According to Oller there are two aspects of language use:

  i.             Factive use – when language is used to convey information about people, things, events, ideas and states of affairs.

ii.             Emoitive use – when language is used to convey our attitude about the factual information we want to convey.

Every time we use language, we use both the aspects of language.  It is quite possible for people to agree on the factual information conveyed but differ on the attitude towards those facts.

There are two major contexts of language use:

  i.             The linguistic context which refers to the verbal and gestural contexts of language; and

ii.             The extralinguistic context, which refers to, the states of affairs constituted by things, events, people, ideas, relationships, feelings, perceptions, memories and so forth.

The objective aspect of extra linguistic context, the world of existing things, may be distinguished from the subjective aspect of extra linguistic context, the world of self - concept and inter-personal relationships.  According to Oller there are systematic correspondences between linguistic and extralinguistic contexts. Linguistic contexts are pragmatically mapped onto extralinguistic contexts, and vice vers a.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is concerned with the relationship between linguistic contexts and extralinguistic contexts.

“Pragmatics is about how people communicate information about facts and feelings to other people, or how they merely express themselves and their feelings through the use of language for no particular audience, except possibly an omniscient god.”    (Oller, 79:19)

Quite often we know much more than what we actually express in words.  We also leave a lot of it unsaid and we depend on the receiver to fill in what is unsaid and interpret our message.

“In normal use of language, no matter what level of language or mode of processing we think of, it is always possible to predict partially what will come next in any given sequence of elements.  The elements may be sounds, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or larger units of discourse. The mode of processing may be listening, speaking, reading, writing, or thinking, or some combination of these.  In the meaningful use of language, some sort of pragmatic expectancy grammar must function in all cases.”            (Oller, 1979:25)

Expectancy Grammar

According to Oller the notion of an expectancy grammar characterizes the psychologically real system that governs the use of a language in an individual who knows that language.  The characteristic of such an expectancy system helps in two ways:

?             To explain why certain kinds of language tests apparently work as well as they do; and

?             To device other effective testing procedures that take account of these salient characteristics of functional language proficiency.

A valid language test should press the learners’ internalised expectancy system into action and must further challenge its limits of efficient functioning in order to discriminate among degrees of efficiency.  According to Oller, a language test to be valid should meet the pragmatic naturalness criteria.  A test is said to meet the pragmatic naturalness criteria when it invokes and challenges the efficiency of the learners’ expectancy grammar by causing him to process temporal sequences in the language that can conform to normal contextual constraints and by requiring him to understand the systematic correspondences of linguistic and extralinguistic contexts.

• Pragmatic Test Types
• Dictiation
• Cloze Tests