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Humanities
- ISSN: 2155-7993
- Journal of Modern Education Review
Pragmatic Competence and EFL Reading Comprehension: Impact of
Culture-specific Schemata on Exam Performance
Trisevgeni Liontou
(Faculty of English Studies, University of Athens, Greece)
Abstract: The present study builds on the assumption that comprehension of pragmatic meaning is more demanding than comprehension of linguistic meaning, in the sense that the latter is schematic, minimal sentence meaning which needs to undergo extensive pragmatic enrichment before it can mean anything of use to the addressee (Carston, 2012; Carston & Hall, 2012). Therefore, the ability to engage in pragmatic inference is an important factor in text understanding, albeit relatively ignored in EFL pragmatics, with the exception of speech acts, routines or strategies which figure in face-to-face interaction (Martínez-Flor & Usó-Juan, 2010). By making use of a variety of Computational Linguistics and Machine Learning tools, the present study turns to a range of pragmatic-cognitive markers which may raise the amount of, or may facilitate pragmatic inference in comprehension of intermediate EFL test-takers sitting for the Greek State Certificate of English Language Proficiency exam. Pragmatic features examined include propositional density (Kintsch, 1998), text abstractness (Paivio, 2006), lexical domains, opaque idioms (Fernando, 1996), as well as psycholinguistic indices of positive/negative emotions, mental states (such as un/certainty, insight, etc.) and evidentiality (source of evidence referring to sight, hearing, touch). Furthermore, data from the KPG English Survey conducted by the RCEL on a national scale in the form of questionnaires administered to candidates sitting for the KPG exams are presented (7,500 questionnaires) along with a discussion on text and task difficulty from the test-takers’ perspective, i.e., their level of familiarity with culture specific topics are presented. Finally, an attempt is made to find the relationship between background cultural knowledge and the readability level of English texts included in the reading test papers of the KPG examinations. Given the influence of culture-specific schemata, it is suggested that test designers should be particularly sensitive to the potential comprehension difficulties EFL readers may encounter due to their lack of familiarity with the culture-specific content presumed by a text and do their best to accommodate for any such discrepancies at an early stage of the test construction process.
Key words: EFL reading comprehension, pragmatic competence, exam performance, impact