Requesting in an EFL Institutional Context: Comparing and Contrasting WDCT, ODCT, and Role-Play with Natural Method

Abstract

Pragmatic assessment has recently opened up a new line of inquiry for many interested researchers within the realm of L2 pragmatics. Accordingly, different methods have been proposed to assess pragmatic competence. Drawing on request speech act, this study aimed at comparing and contrasting Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT), Oral Discourse Completion Task (ODCT), and Role-play with the natural method in terms of five dependent variables: length, repetitions, omissions, inversions, and exclamation particles. To this end, 27 intermediate level EFL learners were asked to make two requests with contextual features of low-status, low-imposition, and two requests with contextual features of high-status, low-imposition using each of the three elicitation techniques. Having recorded the natural talk-in interactions of all students and teachers over 15 weeks, the researchers transcribed the gathered data for further in-depth pragmatic analysis. To analyze the data, Chi-Square and binominal tests were run. The findings indicated that role-play yielded the data closest to the natural method in terms of the dependent variables and the differences between role-play and the natural method were less significant than those inherent in WDCT and ODCT. The study implies that more authentic and natural data can be elicited by incorporating features of the natural method into the other pragmatic data collection procedures, namely, WDCT and ODCT.