Testing of L2 pragmatics: The challenge of implicit knowledge

Abstract

The testing of L2 pragmatics has been a core part of Andrew Cohen’s work. This area has seen steadily increasing research interest with several testing instruments being developed based on both a speech act perspective and an interactional competence perspective. One issue that has received very little attention is the distinction between implicit and explicit pragmatic knowledge. This is in contrast to more general SLA work where these types of L2 knowledge and their implications for language learning and teaching have been thoroughly discussed. This paper intends to raise the profile of the distinction between explicit and implicit pragmatic knowledge and show how different assessment inst..