Native raters’ Assessment of EFL Learners’ Request Productions

Similar to the assessment of general language skills, pragmatics knowledge of the second language (L2) learners has to be assessed precisely. Interlanguge pragmatic (ILP) rating is one of the important areas of pragmatic assessment through which EFL teachers analyze and score the L2 leaners’ pragmatic outputs in specific tasks. Several factors such as raters’ characteristics, raters’ criteria and raters’ variations can easily affect the rating process and undermine the fairness of the test; therefore, EFL teachers’ cognizance of this issue can improve the assessment process. To address this subject, the present study explored native EFL teachers’ criteria in rating request productions of the EFL learners. To this end, 50 experienced American EFL teachers participated in this study to rate Iranian EFL learners’ responses to the six request video prompts and mentioned some comments about the criteria that they considered throughout rating. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of raters’ comments revealed the dominant rating criteria such as politeness, mitigating devices, introduction and explanation, and social distance as well as variations of the rating scores in each situation. The results illuminate the native English speaking teachers’ rating patterns and norms which can be optimal benchmark for non-native EFL teachers who do not have enough experience or knowledge of ILP rating.