AN EXPLORATORY STUDY INTO INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS OF REQUESTS: A GAME OF PERSUASION

Abstract

Teachability and assessment of interlanguage pragmatics are two crucial but still relatively unexplored areas in second language research. Several instruments, such as multiple-choice discourse completion tasks, written discourse completion tasks, role-play tasks, and discourse self-assessment tasks (J. D. Brown, 2001), have been used to assess students' interlanguage pragmatic skills. This paper describes a new assessment-based gaming environment of English as a second language (ESL) pragmalinguistics called A Game of Persuasion that focuses on the speech act of request. This game allows users to engage in interactive written dialogue with an artificial professor (or pedagogical agent) in multiple academic contexts. Students explore contextually and socially appropriate request strategies while the system scores each attempt, assigns points, and provides formative and summative feedback. This paper presents (a) related research on instruments that have been used in the area of interlanguage pragmatics (i.e., request), (b) our assessment-based gaming environment, and (c) reports on results from a study aimed at exploring usability aspects of the game and usage of request strategies employed by 30 English language learners (ELLs) who completed 10 written interactive request tasks with and without the presence of a pedagogical agent.