ABSTRACT

This chapter assesses the pragmatic appropriateness of the second language (L2) speech act production in interactive email role-play-based experimental tasks by rating the overall pragmatic appropriateness of linguistic expressions used in the emails. The pragmatics test described consisted of a role-play task of academic emails in which test-takers communicated with their partners. The email tasks were designed to reflect authentic, real-life academic situations and were similar to those that have been discussed in previous literature in language assessment research on pragmatics. Assessment of L2 pragmatics is an active area of research that combines the interdisciplinary efforts of linguistics, language testing, and second language acquisition, exploring how to assess learners’ socially and interactionally constructed language use in real-life communication. Task reactivity based strategies played an important role in resolving complicated situations dealing with requests and refusals, which is an important part of the assessment of L2 pragmatics in email interactions.