Developing Multiple-Choice Discourse Completion Tasks as Pedagogical Materials in L2 Pragmaticserials in L2 Pragmatics

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<p>This study reports the development of pragmatics teaching materials in the format of multiple-choice<br />discourse completion tasks (MDCTs) by two groups of American in-service TESOL teachers in the<br />United States. One advantage of using MDCTs as pedagogical materials in L2 pragmatics instruction<br />is that they incorporate positive (i.e., the key) and negative (i.e., the distractors) evidence, both of<br />which have been demonstrated to facilitate language learning in SLA research. The other advantage is<br />that they prepare students for multiple-choice standardized tests, which are very common in<br />test-oriented educational systems like Taiwan, China, Japan and Korea. In this study, we asked one<br />group of teachers to design MDCTs based on social appropriateness. Four months later, we asked the<br />other group of teachers to rate and comment on the content and form of the learner speech act data.<br />Each teacher was then required to construct a multiple-choice pragmatics task with a balance between<br />social appropriateness and grammatical accuracy. We close our paper by discussing the pragmatics<br />tasks created by these teachers and suggesting construction principles as a guide to teaching, learning<br />and assessing L2 pragmatic competence.</p>