


Focusing on the area of speech act assessment, this paper presents an overview of these two approaches, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. The other approach, rooted in the tradition of performance-based assessment, involves using a rating scale to evaluate L2 pragmatic performance based on multiple criteria (e.g., clarity of intention, formality level of expressions, and interaction abilities). One approach, rooted in the tradition of contrastive pragmatics, involves comparing and contrasting L2 learners’ pragmalinguistic forms with those of native speakers to determine whether L2 forms approximate native speaker forms. Two approaches have dominated the assessment practice in the field of second language (L2) pragmatics. This state-of-the-art paper discusses common approaches to the assessment of pragmatic competence. This book therefore aims to provide a unifying account of L2 fluency across different sub-disciplines of applied linguistics, to discuss how these different research disciplines can complement each other, and to emphasise the need for a more collaborative approach to researching L2 speech fluency.read more read less We will evaluate a range of external factors affecting speech performance across teaching, testing and real-world communication, including task demands, language assessment constraints, and pragmatic interactional factors affecting fluent communication. The second aim of the book is to place fluency in a broader perspective, in which it can best be understood by teachers, assessors and language professionals. First, it aims to offer the readers an advanced introduction to L2 speech fluency, to research conducted in this area, to theoretical frameworks that inform this body of research, and to methodological principles that are used to investigate and measure L2 speech fluency.
