Vol. 2:1 (2020) ► pp.80–120
Using a corpus in creating and evaluating a DCT
Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) have been one of the most popular tools in pragmatics research. Yet, many have criticized DCTs for their lack of authenticity (e.g., Culpeper, Mackey, & Taguchi, 2018; Nguyen, 2019). We propose that corpora can serve as resources in designing and evaluating DCTs. We created a DCT using advice-seeking prompts from the Q+A corpus (Baker & Egbert, 2016). Then, we administered the DCT to 33 participants. We evaluated the DCT by (1) comparing the linguistic form and the semantic content of the participants’ DCT responses (i.e., advice-giving expressions) with authentic data from the corpus; and (2) interviewing the participants about the instrument quality. Chi-square tests between DCT data and corpus data revealed no significant differences in advice-giving expressions in terms of both the overall level of directness (χ2 [2, N = 660] = 6.94, p = .03, V = .10) and linguistic realization (χ2 [8, N = 660] = 17.75, p = .02, V = .16), and showed a significant difference but small effect size in terms of semantic content (χ2 [6, N = 512] = 30.35, p < .01, V = .24). Taken together with the interview data, our findings indicate that corpora are useful in designing DCTs.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Literature review
- 2.1DCTs
- 2.2Criticism of DCTs
- 2.3Applications of corpora in instrument design and pragmatics research
- 2.4The speech act of advice-giving
- 3.The present study
- 4.Methods
- 4.1Participants
- 4.2Corpus
- 4.3DCT instrument
- 4.4Comparison of advice-giving strategies between DCT and corpus
- 4.4.1Coding schemes for advice-giving strategies
- 4.4.2Statistical analysis of advice-giving strategies
- 4.5Interview
- 4.5.1Interview procedures
- 4.5.2Thematic analysis of interview data
- 5.Results
- 5.1Thematic analysis of interview data
- 5.2Statistical analysis of coded advice-giving strategies in the DCT and corpus data
- 6.Discussion
- 6.1Similarities and differences between DCT elicited and naturalistic advice-giving strategies
- 6.2Designing a DCT with characteristics consistent with the target register to produce an authentic instrument
- 7.Implications for pragmatics research
- 7.1Limitations
- 7.2Future directions
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
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References
https://doi.org/10.1075/ap.19009.has