Abstract
The study I am reporting on today examines how the overall ranking of students’ placement-test essays was influenced by the pragmatic form of the texts the students had produced. Specifically, it documents how patterns in students’ use of information assumed to be either old, inferrable, or new for readers affected the evaluation of the texts and suggests that these effects are, at least partly, a function of the fact that this was a test—a demand that writers not only communicate but also display their ability to do so.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cooper, M. (1984). The pragmatics of form: How do writers discover what to do when? In R. Beach & L. Bridwell, New directions in composition research. (pp.109–126). New York: Guilford Press.
Diederich, P. B. (1974). Measuring growth in English. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.
Ede, L. & Lunsford, A. (1984). Audience addressed/audience invoked: The role of audience in composition theory and pedagogy. College composition and communications, 35, pp., 155–171.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, 3, (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.
Ohmann, R. (1982). “Reflections on class and language.” College English, January, pp. 1-7.
Prince, E. (1981). Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In P. Cole (Ed.), Radical Pragmatics (pp. 223–255). New York: Academic Press.
Roberts, P. (1958). Understanding English. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Notes
All statistics represent Pearson Product-Moment Correlations, unless stated otherwise.
Prince’s analyses themselves did not distinguish this as a separate type of entity. I have extrapolated it from the blurring she observed between Unused and Inferrable entities. Its position in the scale follows from the Gricean Principle (1975) on which the scale is based.
Of course the situation is more complicated than that. Following Gricean notions, I may deliberately choose to use an entity lower or higher on the scale than my assumptions about the state of your knowledge would dictate. If I do so, then the burden falls on you to figure out the reason why I have not been fully cooperative. How such a choice affects readers’ evaluation of the writing is discussed below.
The distinction between audience “addressed” and “invoked” is discussed in Ede and Lunsford (1984).
It is true that they would have understood that the writer had intended it to so apply—the illocutionary act it was supposed to perform. Yet, it is not clear that they would have accepted the writer’s right to perform it. There doesn’t seem much difference between someone saying, in this case, “You can’t tell me that. Who do you think you are anyway—a know-it-all?” and someone saying, “You can’t marry us i Who do you think you are, anyway—a preacher?”.
This is true, of course, not just of placement-testing in particular, but of any situation in which there are marked asymmetries in power between the participants. See Richard Ohmann (1982) for an insightful analysis of the effects of such asymmetries on language use.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1990 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sullivan, F.J. (1990). The Pragmatic Demands of Placement Testing. In: Arena, L.A. (eds) Language Proficiency. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0870-4_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0870-4_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-0872-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-0870-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive