| Few tests today assess functional or pragmatic language proficiency in the English as a second language (ESL) field.; A new test called Pragmatic Competence of American English (PCAE) test was developed to assess pragmatic competence in 4 phases. In Phase I, 61 test item stems were created. Open-ended item stems were administered to 48 native speakers of English to elicit socially appropriate and linguistically accurate options, and to 43 nonnative speakers to elicit distractors. For each item, the distractors had the following composition: Both socially acceptable and linguistically accurate, socially not acceptable but linguistically accurate, socially acceptable but linguistically not accurate, and neither socially acceptable nor linguistically accurate. From this form, in Phase 2 (pretryout), 50 multiple-choice items were tried out to 60 natives and 72 nonnatives and analyzed. Phase 3 (tryout) followed the same procedures as Phase 2 with 40 items, involving the 157 natives and 165 nonnatives. In Phase 4 (validation), the 28-items selected from the 40-item PCAE were administered along with the Functional Test and the TOEFL (used as criterion measures) to investigate the concurrent validity of the new test. Content validity was assessed by 4 ESL experts who reviewed the test item stems during the test construction.; The subjects used for the PCAE validation were 162 ESL students, 83 males and 75 females, from 13 different nations, ages between 16 and 59, who took the 28-item PCAE, the Functional Test (28 items), and the summer 1988 TOEFL in the intensive English programs.; Results demonstrated evidence of concurrent validity of the PCAE. The validity coefficients between PCAE and the Functional Test and PCAE and the TOEFL were.51 and.46, respectively. The intercorrelations among the PCAE score and the TOEFL subscores were from.38 to.47.; The reliability coefficients (internal consistency) of the PCAEs were.90 (50-item PCAE),.87 (40-item PCAE), and.64 (28-item PCAE), respectively.; Reasons were given to educational practitioners and administrators to include the PCAE test as part of their assessment of the ESL student's language competence. |
