Adopting Linacre's guidelines for evaluating rating scale effectiveness, we examined whether and how a six-point rating scale functioned differently across raters, speech acts, and second language (L2) proficiency levels. We developed a 12-item Computerized Oral Discourse Completion Task (CODCT) for assessing the production of requests, refusals,…

This study is the first to examine contributions of proficiency subskills to pragmatic development. We used the latent growth curve modeling to reveal the causal relationships between proficiency subskills and pragmatic competence in 109 American learners of Chinese across two data points over three months abroad in China. Proficiency was measured…