Introduction

'The primary purpose of a language test is to provide a measure that we can interpret as an indicator of an individual's language ability' (Bachman & Palmer, 1996: 23). This is also true for testing learners' pragmatic ability or interlanguage pragmatics, which Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993: 3) defined as 'a non-native speaker's use and acquisition of linguistic action patterns in a second language'. As there have not been many test development studies to date in the area of interlanguage pragmatics (Garcia, 2004; Hudson et al. , 1992, 1995; Liu, 2006; Roever, 2005; Yamashita, 1996) compared to the number of speech act studies carried out strictly for research purposes, it is not an easy task to obtain a comprehensive picture of what is an appropriate measure of interlanguage pragmatics. There is, however, a growing interest in this area due to the important role of pragmatic competence in the development of communicative competence and thus its importance in language teaching itself.

In this chapter, I would like to discuss various possible components for testing interlanguage pragmatics and the need for both production-type and comprehension-type interlanguage pragmatics testing. I will first briefly review the literature in interlanguage pragmatics and testing. Second, I will discuss issues related to learners' pragmatic ability. Third, I will talk about components of testing interlanguage pragmatic ability. Finally, I will describe instruments or methods of testing interlanguage pragmatic ability. After a brief summary of the discussion, future perspectives in testing interlanguage pragmatic ability will be presented.

Theoretical Overview

Pragmatic competence

Pragmatics is defined as 'the study of people's comprehension and production of linguistic action in context' (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993: 3).