View Content #27560

Linda Forrest, CASLS Research Director

Despite increased awareness of the importance of pragmatic, intercultural, and interactional competence, assessing these skills in second language classrooms is challenging. Increasingly, emergent technological tools are available and can deliver lifelike simulations in immersive digital environments. Such simulations provide significant benefits that help mitigate the challenges of assessing pragmatic skills. Some of these benefits include:

1. Simulated interactions resemble those that take place in real life contexts. Information about the context can be established via graphical backgrounds rather than long explanations.
2. Interlocuters can engage in extended sequences of turns, as in real conversations;
3. Interactions can progress along multiple interactional pathways, depending upon the individual choices made by speakers.
4. Interlocuters can respond with non-verbal actions.
5. The interaction can be stopped to elicit learner self-reflections about the interaction, a useful way for teachers to investigate learner beliefs about the interaction.

Currently, the Center for Applied Second Language Studies is developing such an assessment in three languages: English, Spanish, and Chinese. Early pilot results from the Intercultural, Pragmatic and Interactional Competence assessment (IPIC) suggest that learners did indeed find the assessment more natural and enjoyable that typical language tests. Although much work needs to be done before the assessment is ready for prime time, the positive results are encouraging.