A01 cohe4573 01 se fm. Qxd

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F U R T H E R I S S U E S I N L E A R N I N G , T E A C H I N G , A N D A S S E S S M E N T
Assessing pragmatics based on learners’ goals 
and intentions
In assessment based on learners’ goals and intentions, teachers would be
asking:
■
To what extent is the speaker’s language use likely to achieve the goal
(e.g., the match between what the speaker wants to achieve and the
most probable consequence of the pragmatic use)?
■
To what degree does the speaker’s intention match the listener’s most
probable interpretation (e.g., the fit between how polite, direct, and
formal the speaker wants to sound, and how s/he actually sounds to 
the listener)?
In this assessment, teachers could work with their students in detecting the
nuances they are likely to convey intentionally or unintentionally in their
pragmatic behavior. The teachers’ role would include helping learners both
to convey their intended messages and also to accurately interpret messages
that they send and receive.
15
All the while, teachers need to take their learners’
goals and intentions into consideration when engaging in assessment, since
it is ultimately the learners’ prerogative to decide to what extent they wish to
emulate what they perceived as community norms in each situation. How,
then, can learners’ intentions be identified in every contextual situation
where they use the L2? One answer may be to involve learners in somewhat
of a partnership role in the assessment of pragmatics, as opposed to having
teachers do it alone as in conventional classrooms. In such cases, teachers
and learners co-construct the assessment of learners’ pragmatic language use.
This collaboration might in fact be a necessary component in the assessment
of pragmatics, given its culturally sensitive nature.
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The following are two examples of teacher–student collaborative assess-
ment of pragmatics. The items are intended to assess the extent to which the
speaker’s goal and intention match the listener’s most probable inter-
pretation and the consequence of the interaction. In these examples, the
teacher’s feedback is largely in narrative, so they may be more suitable for
formative assessment. (More detailed assessment in numerical terms will
appear in Example 10, and some other variations in Activity 15.1, below.) 
In order to ensure that learners are familiar with the instructions and the
15
Thomas (1983).
16
Ishihara (2008a), (2009).

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A S S E S S M E N T O F P R A G M A T I C S I N T H E C L A S S R O O M
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requirements of the task, it is advised that the format and assessment 
criteria be clearly explained to learners (and if possible, presented to them
bilingually). Because learners may need experience in order to use this 
format effectively, the same or similar format may well be used repeatedly
during instruction.
Example 8