Assessing Persian as a Second Language Learner's Pragmatic Knowledge: the Role of Persian Language Courses, Learner's Mother Tongue and Proficiency Level

Despite the increasing interest in interlanguage pragmatics research, research on the assessment of this crucial area of second language competence still lags behind the assessment of other aspects of second language competence (Rover, 2006). The present study aimed to assess the pragmatic knowledge of learners of Persian as a second language and to explore the effect of Persian language courses, learners’ mother tongue, and learners’ proficiency level on the development of their pragmatic knowledge. Three pragmatics measures, i.e. a discourse self-assessment test, a written discourse completion test, and a multiple-choice discourse completion test, were chosen from Hudson et al.'s (1992, 1995) test battery. The measures were adapted for Persian language assessment. The tests were administered to 65 Persian language learners who were at beginner, intermediate, and advanced proficiency levels. Convenient sampling was used. Based on their mother tongues, the learners were assignd to four language family groups namely Indo-Iranian, European, Afro-asiatic and Altai, and Sino-Tibetan. Through descriptive statistics, Cronbach's alpha, Pearson correlation coefficient, one-way ANOVA and independent samples t- test, the collected data were analyzed. The results confirmed the effect of Persian language courses on the development of learners’ pragmatic knowledge and also showed that the learner's pragmatic knowledge increased as their Persian language proficiency increased. Comparison of the mean scores on the three pragmatics tests indicated differences among the four language families, but not all these differences were statistically significant.