ABSTRACT
This quasi-experimental study investigated the correlations between L1-Mandarin-Chinese English learners’ perception of task difficulty and their pragmatic performances examined through pre-task planning time, speech rate, and pragmatic appropriateness. A total of 80 Chinese participants recorded oral English responses to two PDR-high and two PDR-low request-elicitation tasks in a computer-mediated oral discourse production test. Findings from this study include: 1) in either PDR-high or PDR-low situations, the more difficult a pragmatic task was perceived to be, the lower the speech rate and appropriateness score achieved by the task respondent; 2) The more difficult a PDR-low task was perceived to be, the longer the amount of pre-task planning needed by the task respondent; 3) The correlation between difficulty perceptions and pre-task planning time, however, was non-significant and very weak in the PDR-high tasks. 4) The strengths of the correlations between difficulty perceptions and task performances were sometimes mediated by the sociopragmatic context of the task, i.e., PDR. Implications of this study include that PDR features of a speech act elicitation task can be manipulated in assessment to distinguish proficiency levels and in teaching to facilitate the training of speaking fluency and sophistication.
