Non-native English speaking raters

Conveying a strong message within a language stems from not only a linguistically appropriate utterance but also a pragmatically appropriate discourse. Broadly considering various facets of pragmatics, pragmatic assessment has not been potentially brought into perspective. To address this discourse gap, this study, guided by the principles of mixed-method design, pursued three purposes: to inspect the matches and mismatches, to explore rating variations, and to assess the rater consistency between the holistic and analytic rating methods of disagreement speech acts in L2 by non-native English teachers. As a result, 12 different pragmatic situations for disagreement DCTs accompanied by EFL learners' responses to each situation were rated by 50 non-native English teachers. Initially, they were asked to rate it holistically, incorporating both ratings and providing comments. The content analysis of raters' comments indicated sixteen disagreement criteria. The descriptive statistics also revealed variations across different situations. Moreover, the teachers were asked to rate it analytically based on the assessment rubrics adopted from Ishihara and Cohen (2010). The findings of intra-class correlations implied that respondents were more consistent in analytic rating. Moreover, the results indicated that there was a convergence between the two rating methods suggesting that the raters adopted the same level of leniency and severity in rating. Overall, the results accentuated the significance of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of language for EFL raters. Finally, the results of the present study place a premium on the importance of pragmatic assessment training as well as cultural awareness.

Pragmatic rating is considered one of the novel and crucial aspects of second language education which has not been maneuvered upon in the literature. To address this gap, the current study aimed to inspect the matches and mismatches, to explore rating variations, and to assess the rater consistency between the holistic and analytic rating methods of the speech act of agreement in L2 by non-native English teachers. In this regard, 12 discourse completion tests (DCTs) for agreement accompanied by EFL learners’ responses to each situation were rated by 50 non-native English teachers. Initially, they were asked to rate it holistically, and the content analysis of raters’ comments revealed twelve agreement criteria. Grammatical structure was the prominent criterion which suggested that the raters were predominantly concerned with pragmalinguistics. In particular, the results of descriptive statistics demonstrated that there was a degree of divergence in the frequency of the criteria applied. Additionally, the teachers were asked to rate the pragmatic outputs analytically which showed that the raters were more consistent in the analytic phase. Finally, the findings indicated that there was a convergence between the two rating methods. The results of the present study implicated the necessity of rater training with regard to the rubric-based pragmatic rating. This study offers crucial pedagogical implications for syllabus designers, materials developers, language testers, and some suggestions for further research studies.