The fuzziness of assessing second language speaking performance raises two difficulties in scoring speaking performance: "indistinction between adjacent levels" and "overlap between scales". To address these two problems, this article proposes a new approach, "confidence scoring", to deal with such fuzziness, leading to "confidence" scores between…

Testing of second language pragmatic competence is an underexplored but growing area of second language assessment. Tests have focused on assessing learners' sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities but the speech act framework informing most current productive testing instruments in interlanguage pragmatics has been criticized for…