discourse completion test

Due to the lack of paralinguistic information, politeness gains a considerable significance in telephone conversations (TCs). The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study intended to primarily investigate the fundamental closing structures of TCs in Persian and English. Furthermore, it examined the effect of two contextual variables and time availability on the closing patterns and length of TCs. To this aim, 30 English natives, 30 Persian natives, and 30 Persian EFL learners were selected. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) of 12 scenarios was developed considering contextual variables and time limitation. The obtained results demonstrated that the CPT (closing implicative environment preclosing terminal components) closing pattern may not be applicable in every context. Furthermore, telephone conversers change the pattern and length of TC closing part to maintain their rapport based on the aforementioned variables. The findings of the present study can guide the researcher to follow more complete and perfect politeness models.

The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study aimed primarily to reinvestigate the closing structures of telephone conversation (hereafter abbreviated as TC) in Persian and to discover the common politeness strategies used by native Persian speakers to end their TCs considering the contextual variables of social distance and status. Moreover, this study tried to explore the effect of time availability/limitation along with those contextual variables on TC closing part. To this end, 30 Persian native speakers were selected randomly. A DCT (Discourse Completion Test) of 12 scenarios was developed by considering three criteria: status, time limitation and distance. Analyzing DCTs, many different TC closing patterns were found. The obtained findings depicted that the aforementioned variables had significant effects on the TC closing patterns and strategies taken by the participants. The findings of the present study may be beneficial for extending pragmatic knowledge through emphasizing the significance of pragmatic competence in language proficiency. Also, since the results showed some limitations in the previous politeness models, the findings of this study can guide researchers to follow more complete and perfect politeness models.

Testing interlanguage pragmatics has only recently caught the attention of the scholars in the field (Brown and Ahn, 2011;Liu, 2010) and currently there exist a multiplicity of uncharted areas and unanswered questions. This study is an attempt to develop a test of pragmatics in the Iranian context in relation to the speech acts of request and apology. Test development constituted five stages of exemplar generation, likelihood investigation, scenario generation, initial multiple-choice discourse completion (MDCT) piloting and the final MDCT administration. A total of 245 male and female participants from Sharif University of Technology (SUT) and Iran Language Institute (ILI) participated in different stages of test development. Rasch analysis was conducted for statistical analysis. The results indicate that the test is fairly unidimensional with one misfitting item and no misfittings persons. The test has local independence. Moreover, item reliability is found to be. 88 whereas person reliability is found to be. 64. High item reliability is attributable to the large number of participants.