Defining levels of pragmatic competence in English in Chilean pre-service English language teachers

Abstract

The study reported in this thesis investigated how the pragmatic abilities of three groups of English Language Teaching student in a Chilean University could be classified. The speech act of request (Saeed, 2009) was considered as the speech act of choice to evaluate the pragmatic performance of the participants. Bachman’s (1990) Model of Communicative Language Ability along with The Common European Framework of Language Reference (Council of Europe, 2001) were used to stablish the language domain that was to be assessed. Transcriptions of the participants were analyzed using a rubric designed specifically for this purpose. The analysis showed that the ELT students’ performance could be classified in three different levels. Furthermore, only two of these groups had a marked pragmatic performance, whereas the other could be considered a transition of two different levels of performance. These findings are expected to raise awareness of the importance of this ability in the instruction of English as a second language.