Article appearing in Shiken 19.1 (April 2015) pp. 42-47.
Author: James Dean Brown
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Question: What sorts of tests have been developed and used for testing intercultural pragmatics ability? What do we know about such testing? And, how have those tests been analyzed statistically?
Answer:
The literature on developing intercultural pragmatics tests has (a) found that different testing formats vary in their effectiveness for testing pragmatics, (b) discovered that certain variables are particularly important in testing pragmatics tests, and (c) relied on increasingly sophisticated statistical analyses in studying pragmatics testing over the years. I will address each of these three issues in turn.