Literatura científica selecionada sobre o tema "Discourse completion test"

This article is intended to provide insight to researchers who are still doubtful about the validity and reliability of one of the data collection methodologies, namely the method of discourse completion test in general pragmatic research and interlanguage pragmatics. The literature review was used in the preparation of this article to get the comprehensive picture of the completion discourse test. One of the results is that data collection methods using completion discourse test have advantages and disadvantages. One drawback is that the authenticity of the data and the limitations on the data quality obtained from an informant or respondent, even in certain studies, is judged to not be able to capture sufficiently good data. However, this method is a very good method to find stereotype data because researchers can obtain abundant data in sufficient quantities by this method. In addition, this completion discourse test is very effective in the language study in the cross-cultural domain. This method can be used to capture data in two or more languages with different cultural backgrounds as Blum-Kulka and Olshtain did (in 1984). The control of research variables by using the completion discourse test is considered better because one of the research variables in pragmatic studies is the context of conversation which is very dynamic so that there needs to be controlled. Controlling this research variable is expected to be able to make conclusions that are more conical answer for the research problem. Keywords: discourse completion test, interlanguage pragmatics, research variable control

A survey of the field of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) shows that the Discourse Completion Test (DCT)2, also referred to as a ‘discourse completion task’ or a ‘production questionnaire’, has been the most frequently used instrument to evaluate second/foreign language learners’ ability to perform speech acts in a target language, despite the harsh criticism leveled against its low construct validity and its failure to represent the features of authentic discourse. Interestingly, focusing on the statement of objectives of a number of ILP studies using DCTs, one can notice that such studies rarely refer to the DCT as a language test. In addition, an overview of the DCT design process as described in several ILP studies shows that ever since its adaptation for the study of pragmatic ability (Blum-Kulka, 1982), there has been a tendency to use or adapt one of the existing DCT versions used in previous studies based on the argument of comparability of results. While a number of ILP researchers tried to improve the design of the DCT by the inclusion of rejoinders or by enhancing the prompt material (e.g. Billmyer and Varghese, 2000), few attempts have been made to reconsider the DCT development process. McNamara and Roever (2006: 253) urge for the need for “more research on testing of sociopragmatic knowledge and design of discourse completion tests for testing purposes.”The present paper starts with an overview of the literature about DCTs with special reference to the cognitive validity of the instrument and to previous studies dealing with DCT structure and content. Then, with reference to research in the fields of language testing and psychometrics, it shows that, whether used for research or instructional purposes, the DCT shares several qualities with language tests. As such, it is argued that the DCT should be treated as a language test and not as a questionnaire and should, thus, undergo a rigorous developmental process. Based on recent models of language test construction, the paper concludes with an overview of the stages of DCT development.

Abstract: The problem in this study contents is about the request strategies used by ESL Baturaja University Students. The aim of this study was to determine the most common request strategies used by EFL Baturaja University students. In this analysis, the descriptive approach was used as the research methodology. The study had 80 student population. The sample of the study was 22 that were taken by cluster random sampling taken from English students of English education study program in academic 2020/2021. For collecting the data writer was used a discourse completion test (DCT). Based on the result of the data showed that in the discourse completion test (DCT) regarding the strategy requests used by students. So the result was as much as 16.55°/c student responses used direct strategies, as many as 8 I .81/c student responses used conventionally indirect, and as many as I .62°/c student responses used Non- conventionally indirect. lt means t hat, the dominant request strategies used by EFL was t he conventionally indirect.

This study aims to investigate the realizations of requestive strategies used by Indonesian EFL learners. The respondents are 25 of junior students of the Department of English Education in the University of Kuningan. The data were collected through Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and interview. The collected data were analyzed by using the requestive strategies theory by Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989). The query preparatory is the most term of requestive strategy type used by Indonesian EFL learners in Department of English Education in some different situations on DCT (64.8%). Second is mild hints with 13.6%, third is mood derivable with 10.4%, forth is obligation statement with 7.5%, fifth is want statement with 2.4%, sixth is suggestory formulae with 1.1%, seventh is hedge performative with 0.3% and the last are performative and strong hints with nothings. The respondents incline used requestive strategies which is avoid conflict or threatening to the hearer. The study reveals that the social variables such as power, social distance and ranking of imposition really affect toward the realization of requestive strategies used by Indonesian EFL learners.Keywords: Requestive strategy, Indonesian EFL learners, Discourse Completion Test.

The aim of this study is to investigate the types of the request strategy used by Industrial Engineering students as EFL learners. Using qualitative data, this study discusses the use of request strategy in case-based teaching of foreign languages. The participants of the study are 37 Industrial engineering students who learnt English in the second semester. The testing instruments used were discourse completion task. For this aim, a discourse completion test was used to generate data related to the request strategies by each group. Selection of request situation in discourse completion test was based on three social factors of relative social distance, power, and rank of imposition. The participants� responses were analyzed according to the classifications of request strategy by Blum-Kulka & Olshtain. The case study findings indicate that 57% of Industrial Engineering students� responses mostly use conventional indirect strategies, 29.2 % responses are direct strategies, and 13 % responses belong to non-conventional indirect strategies. 49.7 % responses belong to query preparatory.� 17.8 %� responses� are identified as explicit performatives, 10.3 %� responses categorized as want statements, 9.2 % responses classified as strong hints, 6.5 % responses grouped as mild hints, 4.9 % responses recognized as suggestive formulas, and 1.6 % responses indicated as mood derivable. The indirectness is greatly influenced by students� cultural background, which belong to high-context culture. People in high context culture refer to the value cultures placing on indirect communication. A message is understood with a great deal of gesture, facial expressions, tone of voice, eye contact, body language, posture, and other ways people can communicate without using language. The findings of this study may set pedagogical implications for teachers, and learners of EFL therefore conducting a further field investigation is recommended to have in depth exploration�� about request strategies made by EFL Learners.

<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>

Knowledge of pragmatic has been crucial element to the students English Department. The main focus of the research to find out the level of students pragmatic awareness by using percentage, the research was due to the problem found some students still used inappropriate respond to the pragmatic situation. The design of this research was a descriptive quantitative research in which the sample was taking by using random sampling technique with 25 samples at IAIN Bukittinggi of English Department. Additionally, the analyzing of the data was done by Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) test which is consist of 17 situation, made the description about the students pragmatic awareness in comprehending written discourse, analyzing the data using percentage, describe the data, found the level and making conclusion. The result showed that students pragmatic awareness in comprehending term in deixis is 61% it means the level is good. In performing term of speech act is 79% it means the level is good. Moreover, in understanding maxim is 62% it means the level is good. All of the students pragmatic awareness in comprehending written discourse is 67% it means the pragmatic awareness in comprehending written discourse of English Department of IAIN Bukittinggi is good. The implication of this study to know the level of pragmatic awareness in written discourse of English Department of IAIN Bukittinggi.

The reliability of a modified simplex procedure to select the preferred frequency response on a programmable hearing aid was studied. The effect of stimulus materials on the selected frequency response, along with the consistency in which the selected frequency response was chosen in repeated test runs, was examined. Two groups of hearing-impaired elderly adults (from 59 to 88 years of age, with a mean age of 70 years) who had worn hearing aids for at least 1 year, participated in the study. Subjects were seen for six sessions lasting 2 to 3 hours each. During each session, subjects listened through a programmable hearing aid and selected a preferred frequency response for optimal hearing using a modified simplex procedure. Discourse passages and consonant nonsense syllables, presented in quiet and in noise, were used as the test conditions. Subjective judgment of discourse clarity and syllable recognition were used as criteria. Three estimates of preferred frequency response were obtained within a session when subjective judgment was used as a criterion and two estimates were obtained within a session when syllable recognition was used as a criterion. Subjects returned for a retest approximately 1 week after completion of all test conditions. The results of the study revealed that, depending on test conditions, approximately 30% of subjects selected the same frequency response and 80% of subjects showed test-retest deviation of less than one step size (one cell) in the selected frequency response. The consistency was highest for discourse material presented in noise and lowest for discourse material presented in quiet. Subjects preferred more high-frequency response when consonant syllables were used for recognition than when discourse was used for subjective judgment. On the other hand, more subjects preferred more low-frequency response for discourse judgment than for consonant-syllable recognition. These results suggest that the choice of stimulus materials affect the outcome and consistency in which these outcomes are generated with the simplex procedure.

The aim of this cross-cultural study is to analyze discourse strategies between Finnish and Japanese participants regarding the indexing of in-group and out-group dynamics in Japanese communication. This research is going to concentrate on Finnish and Japanese people’s use of Japanese language to establish uchi/soto (inside/outside) relationships in work-related instances. This study focuses solely on the in-group and out-group dynamics and socio-pragmatic features during interactions with addressees from inside and outside the company, because in these situations the contrast between the dynamics of in-groups and out-groups is often more transparent. The data was processed and analyzed using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) survey.This research aims to answer two questions: How different are the nuanced uses of polite expressions and the politeness strategies between the Finnish and the Japanese respondents, and could it be possible that both respondent groups index uchi and soto relationships in the same way through language use?The results showed similarities in the use of politeness strategies between both groups. Differences were found in code-switching between various politeness levels. The data only serves as an indicator for the hypothesis and gives further room for future research.

碩士
國立高雄第一科技大學
應用日語研究所
103
The aim of this thesis is to explore the usage of the preliminary marks "noda" in spoken Japanese for Taiwanese learners. The preliminary marks "noda" is used when there is something that a speaker would like to imply. It is difficult for the learner of Japanese to distinguish the difference between the use of "noda" as a way to emphasize or explain an idea and the preliminary marks "noda" which is used to imply that there is more to the statement. There are two questionnaires used in this thesis: one is a conversation-oriented questionnaire, namely, the Discourse Completion Test, and the other is a descriptive questionnaire about the differences between "masu" ending sentences and "noda" ending sentences. According to the Discourse Completion Test, Taiwanese learners got less correct answers than Japanese native speakers did. Also, in all the questions, not only Taiwanese learners but also Japanese native speakers made unnatural responses when the preliminary marks "noda" was used. The unnatural responses were found especially in the discourse completion questions which have common use language such as "went to the bathroom" or "had bread for breakfast." Many unnatural responses were given because it is hard to anticipate what a speaker is really trying to convey when using the preliminary marks "noda". On the other hand, there were more correct answers given in questions where “noda” was used to imply an invitation or request from the speaker, meaning these concepts appear easier to understand. According to the descriptive questionnaire, only 27% of Taiwanese learners in the study understood the nuance of the preliminary marks “noda” to indicate that the speaker has something more that they’re trying to imply. However, only 3% answered all of the questions regarding the usage of the preliminary marks “noda”. This finding shows that some Taiwanese learners may understand the nuance of the preliminary marks “noda”, but very few of them understand the usage of it.

While references to the concept of “learning community” abound in the literature, a common ingredient is the belief that learning is enhanced when there is a commitment to sharing ideas and knowledge within a collaborative group or network of individuals. To support student teachers completing their practicum placements as part of a one-year Graduate Diploma of Secondary Education at the Australian Catholic University (ACU National), a communities of practice model (Wenger, 1998) was implemented, supported by a social software-based technology framework, to enable mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire. At the outset, all participants were given hands-on training in the use of the text and audio tools that comprised the technology framework. They then formed peer-to-peer mentoring relationships, creating and sharing web log (blog) entries and voice recordings of critical incidents while on their teaching practicum. The data from the students’ discourse was transcribed, coded, and categorized by evaluating each message unit based upon the type of communication it displayed. The main focus was to identify the discourse elements based on Wenger’s (1998) conceptual framework. The coded scripts were used to explore issues and patterns that were indicators of a learning community. This data, together with post-practicum focus group discussions in which students reflected on the benefits of these media for peer mentoring and support, attests strongly to the relevance and effectiveness of the adopted approach to developing a socio-professional community to support the development of pre-service teachers. It is hoped that this case study will contribute to best practice in the use of social software technologies for online community building and support in professional learning contexts, in ways that transcend organizational and disciplinary boundaries. The authors believe that the best outcomes are achieved when activities are structured, when students are adequately trained in using the technologies, and when instructors or experts are available to scaffold reflection processes as the need arises.

Nowadays, teaching languages for specific purposes, in particular in the field of entrepreneurship, has to focus on pragmatic and intercultural aspects in response to a multicultural professional reality that comprises different areas of knowledge. Our study aims at analyzing the speech act of making a request in German and Spanish by Portuguese native speakers, i.e. BA students of Languages and Business Relations at University of Aveiro. For this study, two different types of tests were performed: the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and the Rating Assessment Test. The data provided by the answers given to these two surveys will help the teacher to understand the pragmatic difficulties students have when making a request in these two foreign languages. The information obtained will help the teacher to focus on aspects that are really problematic from the pragmatic point of view, and at the same time, to find and implement strategies and activities that help students improve their pragmatic awareness and overcome difficulties that may arise in intercultural communication. Hence, the objective is to contribute to an adequate development of the students' pragmatic and intercultural communicative competence.

Learning to order events at discourse-level is a crucial text understanding task. Despite many efforts for this task, the current state-of-the-art methods rely heavily on manually designed features, which are costly to produce and are often specific to tasks/domains/datasets. In this paper, we propose a new graph perspective on the task, which does not require complex feature engineering but can assimilate global features and learn inter-dependencies effectively. Specifically, in our approach, each document is considered as a temporal graph, in which the nodes and edges represent events and event-event relations respectively. In this sense, the temporal ordering task corresponds to constructing edges for an empty graph. To train our model, we design a graph mask pre-training mechanism, which can learn inter-dependencies of temporal relations by learning to recover a masked edge following graph topology. In the testing stage, we design an certain-first strategy based on model uncertainty, which can decide the prediction orders and reduce the risk of error propagation. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods consistently and can meanwhile maintain good global consistency.

Aim/Purpose: [This Proceedings paper was revised and published in the 2018 issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal of e-Skills and Lifelong Learning, Volume 14] The digital divide and educational inequalities remain a significant societal prob-lem in the United States impacting low income, first-generation, and minority learners. Accordingly, institutions of higher education are challenged to meet the needs of students with varying levels of technological readiness with deficiencies in information and digital literacy shown to be a hindrance to student success. This paper documents the efforts of a mid-Atlantic minority-serving institution as it seeks to assess and address the digital and information literacy skills of underserved students Background: A number of years ago, a historically Black university located in Maryland devel-oped an institutional commitment to the digital and information literacy of their students. These efforts have included adoption of an international digital literacy certification exam used as a placement test for incoming freshmen; creation of a Center for Student Technology Certification and Training; course redesign to be performance based with the incorporation of a simulation system, eportfolios, Webquests, a skills building partnership with the University library; pre and post testing to measure the efficacy of a targeted computer applications course taught to business and STEM majors; and student perception surveys Methodology: In 2017, pre and post testing of students in enrolled in core computer applications courses were conducted using the IC3 test administered during the second and fifteenth week of the academic terms. These scores were compared in order to measure degree of change. Additionally, post test scores were assessed against five years of the scores from the same test used as a placement for incoming freshmen. A student perception survey was also administered. The survey included a combination of dichotomous, Likert-scaled, and ranking questions with descriptive statistical analyses performed on the data. The results were used to test four hypotheses. Contribution: This study provides research on a population (first-generation minority college students) that is expanding in numbers in higher education and that the literature, reports as being under-prepared for academic success. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of current studies examining the information and technological readiness of students enrolling at minority serving institutions. This paper is timely and relevant and helps to extend our discourse on the digital divide and technological readiness as it impacts higher education. Additionally, this paper also marks a valuable contribution to the literature by examining the efficacy of computer applications courses in higher education with Generation Z learners Findings: The digital divide is a serious concern for higher education especially as schools seek to increasingly reach out to underserved populations. In particular, the results of this study show that students attending a minority serving institution who are primarily first generation learners do not come to college with the technology skills needed for academic success. Pre and post testing of students as well as responses to survey questions have proven the efficacy of computer applications courses at building the technology skills of students. These courses are viewed overwhelmingly positive by students with respondents reporting that they are a necessary part of the college experience that benefits them academically and professionally. Use of an online simulated learning and assessment system with immediate automated feedback and remediation was also found to be particularly effective at building the computer and information literacy skills of students. Recommendations for Practitioners: Institutions of higher education should invest in a thorough examination of the information and technology literacy skills, needs, and perceptions of students both coming into the institution as well as following course completion. Recommendation for Researchers: This research should be expanded to more minority serving institutions across the United States as well as abroad. This particular research protocol is easily replicated and can be duplicated at both minority and majority serving institutions enabling greater comparisons across groups. Impact on Society: The results of this research should shed light on a problem that desperately needs to be addressed by institutions of higher education which is the realities of the digital divide and the underpreparedness of entering college students in particular those who are from low income, first generation, and minority groups Future Research: A detailed quantitative survey study is being conducted that seeks to examine the technology uses, backgrounds, needs, interests, career goals, and professional expectations with respect to a range of currently relevant technologies