representation of politeness markers across different measures of pragmatic knowledge

The question of whether, and to what extent, different measures of pragmatic knowledge mirror students' capabilities as represented in their authentic application of language has been an important consideration in the vicinity of interlanguage pragmatics. to examine the production of politeness markers, as defined by house and kasper's (1981) seminal work, this study compared and contrasted language learners' performance across four different measures of pragmatic competence in an efl setting: written discourse completion test, oral discourse completion test, role-play, and natural methodology. furthermore, the requests with similar characteristics made by 27 learners in natural situations, and by means of wdct, odct, and role-play, were analyzed. the results revealed that hesitators were highly prevalent in natural methodology, while consultative devices and scope-stators were more popular in the wdct, odct, and role-play. this suggests that, regardless of some minor similarities, there are significant disparities between the three conventional data-gathering techniques and natural methodology. the findings further exhibit that natural methodology might not necessarily be the ideal pragmatic measure to represent all politeness markers. wdct, odct, and role-play could be more appropriate to draw on learners' explicit/declarative knowledge, while natural methodology might be more advantageous to capitalize on learners' automated/procedural knowledge.