Proceedings of Intercultural Competence Conference

http://cercll.arizona.edu

September, 2012, Vol. 2, pp. 85-99

REVERSE DISCOURSE COMPLETION TASKS

Mehmet Kanik
The University of Houston
email:mkanik@uh.edu, mehmetkanik@gmail.com
This paper proposes that with modification, discourse completion tasks (DCT) can be used
as a test of intercultural communicative competence and pragmatic competence. Traditional
DCTs give a sociocultural context and ask respondents to provide a speech act appropriate
for the given situation. This gives the researcher or evaluator an idea of the pragmalinguistic
repertoire of the respondents, allowing them to make indirect assumptions about
respondents sociopragmatic knowledge or sociolinguistic competence. This paper
proposes a reverse DCT (R-DCT) to assess sociopragmatic or sociolinguistic competence.
In an R-DCT, a speech sample is given and test takers are asked to create a situation in
which the given utterance may be appropriate. With this characteristic, R-DCT can give
researchers more direct access to respondents knowledge of sociopragmatic variables like
power, distance and imposition. R-DCTs can show a clear understanding of respondents
interpretation of pragmalinguistic units. For this purpose, an R-DCT was given to 12
learners of Turkish as a second language. The results show that R- DCTs can be a simple
tool to assess sociopragmatic knowledge of respondents without the need for a statistical
comparison with native speaker data. Therefore, I propose R-DCTs as tools to assess
intercultural communicative competence and pragmatic competence.

INTRODUCTION
Chapter 49 Verse 13 of the Quran reads: People, We created you all from a single man and a
single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should get to know one
another People have been in contact with each other throughout history, but globalization
has resulted in increased contact among people from different cultures today. It is the
globalization in the 20th century that led scholars to coin terms such as global citizen, global
competence and intercultural competence. Fantini (2009) defines intercultural competence as
"complex abilities that are required to perform effectively and appropriately when interacting with
others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself" (p. 458). In an attempt to
clarify the multitude of conceptions and definitions of intercultural competence, Deardorff (2004,
2006) conducted a study with participating scholars and administrators at universities, which
she refers to as "the first study to document consensus" (Deardorff, 2011, p. 66). She found in
her study that intercultural scholars agree on a definition similar to Fantini's definition. The
definition in her study is "the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural
situations based on ones intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes" (Deardorff, 2006, p. 2478).
In a highly cited model, Byram (1997) proposes that intercultural (communicative) competence
comprises linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and intercultural components. Byram (1997)
states that he bases his model on Van Ek's (1986) model of communicative competence.
Byram's model is different from that of Van Ek's, which is based on native speaker competence.
Unlike Van Eks model, Byrams model is based on intercultural speaker competence.
According to Byram, there are two major reasons for criticizing models like Van Ek's. The first
reason is that by using native speaker competence as a model they set an unrealistic goal for
learners. The second reason is that such a competence is a wrong kind of competence, leading
to abandonment of one's native competence to attain the competence of other native speakers
(Byram, 1997, p. 11). In Van Eks model, learners are expected to rely only on the unattainable

Copyright 2012

85

Mehmet Kanik

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

competence of native speakers, however, in Byrams model an intercultural speaker would rely
on their competence in two or more languages to function well in an intercultural setting.
There are opposing opinions about the definitions of intercultural communicative competence.
While Deardorff (2009, p. 248) thinks that definitions of intercultural competence mainly focus
on communication, Fantini (2009, p. 456) believes that target language competence is ignored.
In his own model, Fantini (2009) asserts that communicative competence in the native language
and communicative competence of the interlocutor together constitute intercultural competence.
When it comes to the assessment of intercultural competence, scholars agree that intercultural
competence is a complex phenomenon and the assessment should be achieved by employing a
variety of measures (Fantini, 2009; Deardorff, 2011). They agree that one tool cannot measure
intercultural competence. Deardorff (2011) asserts "given how daunting intercultural
competence assessment can seem, it is important to start with manageable portions (p. 74).
Fantini (2009) outlines measures addressing different aspects of intercultural competence and
says that most of the measures lack a language component. Even so, he lists a few that have a
component for language proficiency including MAXSA Instruments, which comprise three
instruments, one of which is speech act measures. An example for speech act measures from
MAXSA instruments is below:
1) During dinner with a friends family in the host community you accidentally spill
your glass of red wine on the table cloth.
You:
Friends mother: Oh, dear!
You:
Friends mother: No, no. Dont worry about it. You dont have to do that. The stain
will
probably come out in the wash.
You:
(Cohen, Paige, Shively, Emery, & Hoff, 2005, p. 346)
This construct is known as a discourse completion task/test (DCT) or discourse completion
questionnaire (DCQ) and has been used in the field of pragmatics. Fraser (1980) developed the
earliest form of a DCT for collecting speech act data for research purposes (as cited in Cohen
2004: 303). The DCT provides sociocultural context and asks learners to provide utterances
that would be appropriate for that situation. The DCT was adapted by various scholars after
Frasers (1980) study for collecting speech act data. For example, Cohen, and Olshtain (1981)
used one of the earliest forms of discourse completion tasks for assessing adult L2 apology
performance in English and Hebrew (p. 133). In another earlier study, Blum-Kulka (1982)
assessed Hebrew learners use of directives with a discourse completion task. She compared
Hebrew learners to native speakers in speech act performance. In a follow-up study using a
modified version of the task used in Blum-Kulka (1982), Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984) ran A
Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP). In this project, they
collected data in Hebrew, Australian English, American English, British English, Canadian
French, Danish, German and Russian. The DCT they used in their study required test takers to
complete incomplete discourse sequences with the most appropriate speech act set of requests
and apologies. The items included information about setting, social distance and relative status
of interlocutors (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984, p. 198). Social distance, relative power of
speakers and the ranking of imposition are considered to be the three defining sociopragmatic
factors in the use of speech acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Hudson, Detmer & Brown, 1995).

86

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

Mehmet Kanik

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

The focus of assessing pragmatic competence has usually been on the use of strategies to
produce an appropriate speech act for a given situation. Comparing language learners speech
act strategy use to that of native speakers in a given language has also been commonly used in
interlanguage pragmatics research. The major reason for the use of elicitation tasks is that
collecting data with elicitation tasks such as DCT brings ease while naturally occurring data is
hard to gather. Standardization also becomes an issue in naturally occurring data whereas
control of variables and settings in DCT is easier. Collecting natural data from the same users
for research purposes is also quite challenging (Cohen, 2004). As a result, elicitation tasks
such as DCTs have been commonly used. However, since such tasks do not bring natural
data, they have brought with them questions regarding their validity and thus such elicitation
tasks have been evaluated by some scholars. Some compared DCT to naturally occurring data
and other elicitation tasks (e.g., Golato, 2003; Hinkel, 1997; Rose, 1994; Rose & Ono, 1995;
Yuan, 2000). Other researchers evaluated the construct of DCTs. These efforts or suggestions
included investigating the effect of adding more descriptions to the DCT situation (Varghese &
Billmyer, 1996), giving the situation in video format (Zuskin, 1993), adding rejoinders to the DCT
(Roever, 2006; Rose, 1992), adding multiple rejoinders (Cohen & Shively, 2002), investigating
the effect of the type of rejoinder (Johnston, Kasper, & Ross, 1998) and the difference between
oral and written DCTs (Sasaki, 1998).
Such test types and modifications listed above are efforts to make the measures of pragmatics
more valid and reliable. However, Cohen (2004) says, while any enhancement may make the
task more authentic, we must remember it is still a task attempting to simulate reality (p. 317).
Considered in this way, DCT does not prove that a learner can perform speech acts
appropriately in a natural situation, but it shows the potential and the linguistic formulas a
person has and some opinions about his/her sociopragmatic awareness. So whereas the
purpose of the test is to assess learners offline knowledge or repertoire of semantic formulas,
DCTs are an appropriate instrument (McNamara & Roever, 2006, p. 67). This gives the
researchers or testers an indirect opinion about test takers competence. Conclusions about
test takers sociopragmatic knowledge are to be drawn from the pragmalinguistic items in their
responses. Leech (1983) draws a distinction between sociopragmatics and pragmalinguisitcs (p.
11). He refers the level of pragmatics in which politeness, appropriacy, power relations,
distance between speakers, and imposition of speech acts are interpreted as sociopragmatics.
Leech defines this level as the sociological interface of pragmatics. By pragmalinguistics, on
the other hand, he refers to the particular resources which a given language provides for
conveying particular illocutions. For example, knowing the form would you like entails
pragmalinguistic competence whereas knowing when to use it requires sociopragmatic
competence.
From this perspective, I believe that reversing the DCT will give a more direct idea of the
sociopragmatic knowledge of test takers. In a reverse discourse completion test (R-DCT), test
takers are provided with speech acts and asked to write a situation in which that given speech
act could be uttered. Given this facet of R-DCT, I propose that it can be a test of intercultural
competence as well as pragmatic competence. If we go back to Byrams model of intercultural
communicative competence, we see that it is similar to the communicative competence model
of Canale and Swain (1980), which includes grammatical, sociolinguistic, strategic and
discourse competences (Canale, 1983). Bachman (1990) came out with a model of
communicative language ability, which has overlapping components with Byrams and Canale
and Swains model. Bachmans model is outlined below:

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

87

Mehmet Kanik

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Communicative language ability (Bachman, 1990)

(Communicative competence model of Canale and Swain (1980))
(Intercultural communicative competence model of Byram (1997))
1. Language competence
a. Organizational
i. Grammatical competence
(Grammatical competence in Canale and Swain (1980))
(Linguistic competence in Byram (1997)
ii. Textual competence
(Discourse competence in Byram (1997) and Canale (1983))
b. Pragmatic
i. Illocutionary competence
ii. Sociolinguistic competence
(Sociolinguistic competence in Byram (1997) and Canale and Swain
(1980))
2. Strategic competence
(Strategic competence in Canale and Swain (1980))
(Could be related to intercultural competence in Byrams (1997) model as strategic
competence is conceptualized as a coping strategy and intercultural competence entails
coping with intercultural contexts and communication)
3. Psychophysiological mechanisms
As could be seen above, according to Bachmans (1990) model of communicative competence,
pragmatics is a subcomponent of language competence and is comprised of sociolinguistic and
illocutionary competences; the former is also addressed in Canale and Swains (1980) and
Byrams (1997) models, which, on the other hand, do not include illocutionary competence.
Bachman (1990) defines illocutionary competence as the knowledge of the pragmatic
conventions for performing acceptable language functions and sociolinguistic competence as
the knowledge of sociolinguistic conventions for performing language functions appropriately in
a given context (p. 90). To illustrate this, she says:
Imagine a context in which I wish to get someone to leave. To accomplish this, I
use my illocutionary competence, which indicates that a simple statement can
function as a request. (I will also use my sociolinguistic competence to
determine which of several possible statements is the most appropriate in this
specific context). (p. 90)
In this respect, Bachmans definitions of illocutionary and sociolinguistic competences are
parallel to Leechs (1983) distinction between pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics
respectively.
While different models of communicative competence have a sociolinguistic competence
component, traditional DCTs ask respondents to provide illocutionary (pragmalinguistic) items,
and with this data, DCTs give a good idea of the pragmalinguistic repertoire of speakers. In this
way, DCTs could be understood to be aiming towards illocutionary competence in Bachmans
model. However, R-DCT will focus more on sociolinguistic competence, which is addressed in
the models of communicative competence and intercultural communicative competence
mentioned in this paper. With this characteristic, R-DCT will assess the sociolinguistic
competence component of intercultural competence and pragmatic competence.
88

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

Mehmet Kanik

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

WHAT IS A REVERSE DISCOURSE COMPLETION TASK?

In a traditional discourse completion task, a situation is provided to the test-takers or
participants and they are asked to provide utterances that they think would be appropriate in the
given situation. In the R-DCT, utterances are provided and participants are asked to write about
a situation in which the given utterance would be appropriate. Below is an example of an item:
Write a situation in which the below statement could be uttered. Also, provide
information regarding setting, who the speaker is, who the listener is and what is asked.
Speech act: I know you came from another city but to reach a final decision about you I
need to see you again next week.
Situation:
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Setting: _____________________________
Speaker: ____________________________
Hearer: _____________________________
Request: ____________________________
One challenge of this construct is to select the utterances provided. They need to be authentic
or elicited from the speakers of the language in which the test is given (not necessarily native
speakers). They need to have a potential to represent the targeted situation (e.g., a request
situation in which the power of the speaker is higher than the hearer, the distance between the
speaker and the hearer is high, and the imposition of the act on the speaker is high).
METHOD
The data was collected using a reverse discourse completion test including four requests in
Turkish. These requests were taken from data collected in Kaniks (2011) study. The
utterances chosen were selected because they were believed to represent requests in the given
situations as they were composed of the most commonly used strategies in the given situations.
First, the average number of strategies used for each situation was calculated and then the
most commonly used strategies for the calculated average were selected. Finally, requests
representing the common strategies were chosen for this study. Data from 65 native Turkish
speaking participants in Turkish-medium degree programs at a major university in Istanbul were
used in selecting requests to be used in R-DCT employed in this study. Situations in Kanik
(2011) were created based on three sociopragmatic variables of relative power of speaker to
hearer, distance between speaker and hearer and the absolute ranking of imposition (Brown &
Levinson, 1987; Hudson, Detmer & Brown, 1995). Only situations with high imposition were
used. Four situations with low imposition used in Kanik (2011) were not included in this study.
The reason why they were excluded is because they yielded shorter speech acts and thus did
not give enough idea about the situation in which the speech act could be uttered. The other
two variables, namely power and distance, were ranked either high or low and thus naturally
distribute to four situations based on their rankings. The table below represents the four of the
eight situations for which the request data were gathered in Kanik (2011). For this study,
participants wrote situations in which the utterance would be appropriate in Turkish. The
CERCLL ICC Proceedings

89

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Mehmet Kanik

satisfactory responses would be those that are relevant and that would represent the
sociopragmatic variables of the situations for which the utterances were used in Kanik (2011).
Table 1. Situations
Speaker

Hearer

Request

Situation 1

A human resources
manager

An applicant

Come again next week

for a second interview

Situation 2

A manager in a factory

A worker

Work overtime

Situation 3

An employee in a
restaurant

A customer

Move to another table

Situation 4

A college student

A professor

Extend deadline for a

project

The four requests retrieved from the earlier data were given to 12 learners of Turkish as a
foreign language at a university in Istanbul, Turkey. These students came from six different
countries. Seven of them were male and five of them were female. The mean age of the
participants was 25. At the time of data collection, they were aiming to study in Turkey and thus
they were learning Turkish at the language center of a university. These students took the
questionnaire within the last month of their first academic year in Istanbul. Tables 2 and 3 show
participants profiles.
Table 2. Participants countries of origin
Countries of Origin
Afghanistan
Bosnia-Herzegovina
China
Kazakhstan
Turkmenistan
Ukraine

Number
1
1
6
2
1
1

Table 3. Participants age

Group
Female
Male
Total

Mean
23.2
24.2
23.8

N
5
7
12

Median
24
22
23.5

Minimum
20
21
20

Maximum
25
33
33

Range
5
12
13

After the data was gathered, the situations written about by the participants were analyzed for
role relationship and the requests asked in the situations. Based on the role relationship and
requests imposed, the ranking of power relationship, distance and the imposition of requests
were defined. Initially, there were data from more than 12 participants, however, some of the
data did not reveal role relationships, and thus they were excluded from the data since this
study depended on role relationships in situations written about by the participants. Based on
the role relationships and the relevance of the situation with the utterance, the situations were
scored satisfactory or unsatisfactory. The instrument below (figure 1) was used while assessing
the responses.
90

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Mehmet Kanik

Figure 1. Assessment rubric

RESULTS
Scoring based on the sociopragmatic factors and the relevance of the situations revealed the
following scores.
Table 4. R-DCT scores
Participant
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Mean

Score/40
20
40
30
30
30
40
40
20
30
30
30
30
30.83

According to table 4, three participants wrote about situations that are relevant and would be
appropriate for the given utterances in all four scenarios. Seven of them were able to write
relevant and appropriate situations in three of the four scenarios. Two of them were able to
provide situations for the given utterances satisfactorily in only two scenarios. Below is the
descriptive statistics representing results for each scenario.

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

91

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Mehmet Kanik

Table 5. Descriptive Statistics

s1
s2
s3
s4
Score

N
12
12
12
12
12

Minimum
.00
.00
.00
.00
20.00

Maximum
10.00
10.00
10.00
10.00
40.00

Mean
7.5000
6.6667
7.5000
9.1667
30.8333

Std. Deviation
4.52267
4.92366
4.52267
2.88675
6.68558

Table 5 reveals that scenario 2 resulted in the lowest mean score while scenario 4 resulted in
the highest mean score. It could be concluded that students had the most difficulty in
designating roles for scenario 2 and the least difficulty to do so in scenario 4. The next four
sections summarize the role relationships created by the participants for each scenario.
Samples from the data are also given.
Scenario 1
The utterance was used for a situation in which a human resources manager asks an applicant
who is from another city to come again next week for a second interview. The sociopragmatic
variables in this situation were originally rated by educated native speakers of Turkish and their
ratings reflect the power of the speaker, in this case the human resources manager, the
distance and the imposition as high. The chosen utterance that reflects the most commonly
used strategies for the given situation is Biliyorum baka bir ehirden geldiniz ama sizinle ilgili
kararm netletirebilmem iin haftaya tekrar sizinle grmek istiyorum [I know that you came
from another city but to clarify my decision about you I need to see you again next week]. The
table below summarizes the role relationship and the ranking of sociopragmatic factors.
Table 6. Role relationships in the data in scenario 1
Speaker
Employer
Doctor
Police (Immigration
officer)
Student
Business representative

Hearer
Applicant
Patient
Foreign resident

Student
Business
representative
Notes: (+) = high; (-) = low; (=) = neutral

# (%)
8 (66.6)
1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)

Power
+
+

Distance
+
+
+

Imposition
+
+
+

1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)

=
=

As could be seen from the table, eight of the twelve respondents designated situations with an
employer as a speaker and an applicant as a hearer, resulting in a high ranking of power and
distance. Another participant chose the roles of a police (immigration) officer and a foreign
resident to reflect high ranking of power and distance. All nine participants included a request
for a second appointment to an applicant from another city, creating high imposition. In the
assessment of intercultural competence or pragmatic competence, those test takers who write
about a situation in which the utterance would be appropriate would be considered satisfactory.
A sample situation from the data is below.
Bir irketin mdrsnz. Bir elemanla i grmesi yapmanz iin [sic.] haftaya tekrar
gelmesini rica ediyorsunuz [You are the director in a company. You are requesting an
employee [applicant] to come again next week to have a job interview.] Participant #6,
Male, 24, China
92

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Mehmet Kanik

Scenario 2
The request was used for a situation in which a manager asks an employee to work overtime.
In the previous study, the power of the speaker and the imposition were ranked high while
distance was ranked low by native speakers of Turkish. The utterance that was chosen for this
study is Yarn tefti var. Bugn temizlik iin mesaiye kalabilir misin? [There is inspection
tomorrow. Could you work overtime today for cleaning?] Table 7 summarizes the role
relationship and the ranking of sociopragmatic factors in situation 2.
Table 7. Role relationships in the data in scenario 2
Speaker
Hearer
Boss
Employee
Secretary
Coworker
Security guard
Cleaner
Administrator
Teacher
Principal
Student
Notes: (+) = high; (-) = low; (=) = neutral

# (%)
8 (66.6)
1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)

Power
+
=
=
+
+

Distance
+

Imposition
+
+
+
+
+

Table 7 indicates that nine participants created situations in line with the situation the original
utterance was used for. That is, a speaker with higher power than the hearer, low distance
between the speaker and the hearer and high imposition. While doing so, eight of them used a
boss and an employee while one participant used an administrator and a teacher as roles.
However, the administrator-teacher situation would be unusual, as cleaning is not typically
conducted by teachers at schools. Of the remaining three situations, two include neutral power
relations. One participant preferred the roles of a secretary and a coworker and another that of
a security guard and a cleaner. Again, it would be unusual for a secretary or a security guard to
ask a coworker or a cleaner to work overtime. The last situation entails an interaction between
a principal and a student. This situation is also unusual as students do not do cleaning and it is
irrelevant, as the utterance conveys working overtime clearly and does not apply to this
scenario. Thus, these three responses that are not in line with the sociopragmatic factors of the
situation the utterance was used for cannot be considered satisfactory responses. A sample
situation from the data is below:
Bir fabrikada ef olarak alyorsunuz. Bugn fabrikada bitmesi gereken temizlik var.
Bunu [sic.] bir alannzdan mesaiye kalmasn istiyorsunuz [You work as a manager at
a factory. There is cleaning left to be finished today at the factory. You are asking one of
your staff to work overtime.] Participant #2, Female, 20, Afghanistan
Scenario 3
The utterance used in this scenario was used for a situation in which an employee in a
restaurant asks a first-time customer who reserved a table for a special night to move to another
table. The sociopragmatic factors were ranked as low power on the part of the speaker and
high distance as the employee does not know the customer and high imposition as the
employee is intruding on customers special night and asking them to move away from the table
they specifically reserved for the night. The utterance used for this situation is Efendim, ok
zr dilerim. Burada teknik ekibin acilen almas gerekiyor. Sizi baka bir masaya alabilir
miyiz? [Sir/madam, I deeply apologize. The technical team needs to work here immediately.

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

93

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Mehmet Kanik

Could we move you to another table?] Table 8 summarizes the role relationships in the
situation created by the participants for this utterance.
Table 8. Role relationships in the data in scenario 3
Speaker
Hearer
Waiter
Customer
Waiter
Customer
Teacher
Student
Worker
Worker
Chair of a meeting
Participants
Secretary
Customer
Customer representative
Customer
Construction worker
Customer
Notes: (+) = high; (-) = low; (=) = neutral

# (%)
2 (16.6)
4 (33.2)
1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)
1 (8.3)

Power
+
=
=
-

Distance
+
+
+
+
+

Imposition
+
+

As could be seen from the table, there is more variability in this situation. Six participants
created situations with waiter and customer roles. Two of these situations do not convey high
impositions and overall only five of the situations include high imposition requests. Four of
these involve an interaction between a waiter and a customer and one of them between a
construction worker and a customer. The setting is a restaurant. The reason for low imposition
scenarios (i.e. ones having no indication of special circumstances making the situation more
difficult) could be that the utterance does not refer to special night or special reservation of the
table. If the utterance had a disarmer (e.g. I know that you are celebrating a special day, but),
more participants might have created situations with high imposition requests. However, the
mean of the number of strategies and the most commonly used strategies based on the mean
of strategies did not include a disarmer in the previous study. Thus, situations that do not reveal
high imposition are considered to be acceptable for the given utterance. Other role
relationships used include worker-worker, chair of a meeting-participants, teacher-student,
customer representative-customer and secretary-customer. The first two have neutral power
relationship and the last two convey low power, high distance but low imposition. One of the
situations, teacher-student, is not an appropriate situation for the given utterance. The
utterance could not be directed to a student by a teacher as the utterance (Sir/Madam, I deeply
apologize) would be a strong request and would not reflect a typical utterance by a teacher
addressed to a student. A sample situation from the data is below.
Bir lokantada garson olarak alyorsunuz. Mteriye teknik ekibin acilen almas
gerektiini sylyorsunuz ve onlar baka masaya alacanz sylyorsunuz [You work
as a waiter in a restaurant. You tell your customer that the technical team needs to work
immediately and tell them you will move them to another table.] Participant #7, Female,
25, Kazakhstan (Russian)
Scenario 4
The utterance in this scenario came from the situation in which a college student asks a
professor to extend deadline for a project. The original ratings of sociopragmatic factors
revealed a speaker with low power, low distance between speaker and hearer and high
imposition as the deadline for submitting grades for the professor is approaching. The utterance
reads Biliyorum proje teslimi iin son gn geldi ama ben yetitiremedim. Bana iki gn daha
msaade edebilir misiniz? [I know that today is the deadline for project submission, but I could
not finish it. Could you excuse me two more days?] Table 9 outlines the role relationships that
emerged in participants responses.
94

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Mehmet Kanik

Table 9. Role relationships in the data in scenario 4

Speaker
Hearer
Student
Professor
Employee (architect,
Boss
engineer, researcher)
Boss
Boss
Notes: (+) = high; (-) = low; (=) = neutral

# (%)
6 (50)
5 (41.6)

Power
-

Distance
-

Imposition
+
+

1 (8.3)

In this scenario, 11 participants designated situations that were in line with the situation the
utterance was originally used for in terms of the sociopragmatic design, that is, a speaker with
low power, low distance between the speaker and hearer, and high ranking of imposition. Of
these 11 situations, six revealed a student-professor scenario while five revealed employeeboss scenario. Only one participant preferred a neutral power relationship between two bosses.
Below is a sample situation from data.
Siz bir rencisiniz. Mezun olmak iin bir proje hazrlamalsnz. Teslim gn geldii
zaman proje hazr deildi. Bu sebeple retmene iki gn daha msaadeyi [sic.]
soruyorsunuz [You are a student. You must prepare a project to graduate. The project
is not ready on submission day. For this reason, you are asking your teacher for two
more days.] Participant #8, Female, 23, Ukraine
DISCUSSION
Traditional discourse completion tasks ask respondents to write (even say or act out) a speech
act for a given situation. With this characteristic, we may gain insight into the pragmalinguistic
repertoire of the respondent (illocutionary competence in Bachmans (1990) model of
communicative competence) and make inferences about his or her sociopragmatic
interpretation of a situation (sociolinguistic competence in Bachmans (1990) model. Reverse
discourse completion task reverses the situation and allows the researcher or tester to better
understand how the respondent interprets the utterance and the sociopragmatic aspects or
forces it carries. It gives a better picture of sociolinguistic awareness of the participant rather
than illocutionary items the respondents have at their disposal. R-DCTs will make it easier to
assess intercultural communicative competence or pragmatic competence. Those participants
who could create relevant situations with socipragmatic characteristics similar to situations in
which the given utterances were used will be considered satisfactory. Those that create
situations that carry sociopragmatic factors different from the original situations will have
problems. This is also confirmed by the data. Data revealed that situations that carry the
sociopragmatic characteristics of the original situation would be those in which the given
utterance would be appropriate. Those that differ from the original situation in terms of
socipragmatic factors turned out to be the ones in which the utterance would not be appropriate.
Another finding is even if respondents created situations with roles different from the original
situations, the given utterance could potentially be appropriate as long as the sociopragmatic
factors do not contradict with the original situations. This shows that an approach to
assessment using sociopragmatic factors could be useful in assessing intercultural or pragmatic
competence.
Another advantage of reverse discourse completion tasks is that they could help diminish the
need for comparing learner data with native speaker data. Assessing competences with native
speaker criteria has been criticized in the field of intercultural competence (Byram, 1997).
CERCLL ICC Proceedings

95

Mehmet Kanik

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Although the utterances used in this study came from data collected from native speakers of
Turkish, statistical comparison with native speakers would not be necessary. A better way of
utilizing utterances for reverse discourse completion task would be getting them from spoken
corpora. However, the corpora should be clear about the role relationships in the situation in
which the speech sample is used. In this way, a natural and appropriate utterance, regardless
of whether it comes from a native speaker or not, could be used as the prompt in an R-DCT.
Thus, successful interchanges from a corpus, be it among native speakers or not, could be used
as prompts in R-DCTs.
In addition, in a traditional discourse completion task, second language learners/speakers
failure to provide an utterance that is similar to a native speakers may be due to several factors.
It may be, for instance, because (1) the participant did not understand the text in the DCT
prompt, (2) he or she did not understand the situation described in the prompt, (3) he or she
used conventions in his or her first language and they did not transfer well, or (4) they
understood everything but did not have the pragmalinguistic forms in their repertoire. There
may even be more factors. Such complexity makes traditional discourse completion tasks weak
candidates for assessing intercultural or pragmatic competence because it is not clear what to
attribute non-native speakers failure to provide native speaker utterances to. There is also the
question whether it is even desirable to compare their utterance to native speakers utterances
as discussed by Byram (1997). In this regard, R-DCT helps eliminate such complexities and
allows us to make better judgments about respondents intercultural or pragmatic competence.
We could tell whether a respondent is likely to be engaged in misinterpretations or
misunderstandings based on how he or she interprets the given utterances.
In evaluating the prototypical task I created, I encountered a problem. I collected data from
more than 12 participants. However, the task did not require participants to explicitly identify
roles (see appendix). Therefore, some responses did not make any indication about the roles of
the speakers and hearers in the situations they created and thus their responses could not be
used for the purpose of this study. Therefore, this study has its limitations. However, this led to
the second version of the prototype as could be seen from the sample item given in the second
part above. A reverse discourse completion task created with items that ask respondents to
explicitly identify roles will address this limitation. In brief, this study proposes a new measure,
which I have proposed to name reverse discourse completion task for assessing intercultural
(communicative) competence as well as pragmatic competence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mehmet Kanik received his BA in Foreign Language Education from METU, his BS in TESOL
from the University of Southern California, and his Ph.D. in English Language Teaching from
Istanbul University. His current research interests are cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-linguistic
influence, English as a lingua franca and testing of pragmatics.

REFERENCES
Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language teaching. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

96

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

Mehmet Kanik

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Blum-Kulka, S. (1982). Learning to say what you mean in a second language: A study
of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language.
Applied Linguistics 3, 29-59.
Blum-Kulka, S. & Olshtein, E. (1984). Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of
speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics, 5, 196-213.
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language use.
Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Canale, M. (1983). From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy. In
Richards, J. C. & Schmidt, R. W. (Eds.), Language and Communication (pp. 2-27).
London: Longman.
Canale, M. & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second
Language Teaching and Testing. Applied Linguistics, 1, 1-47.
Cohen, A. (2004). Assessing speech acts in a second language. In D. Boxer & A. Cohen (Eds.),
Studying Speaking to Inform Second Language Learning (pp. 302-327). Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Cohen, A. D. & Olshtain, E. (1981). Developing a measure of socio-cultural
competence: The case of apology. Language Learning, 31(1), 113-134.
Cohen, A. D., Paige, R. M., Shively, R. L., Emery, H., & Hoff, J. (2005). Maximizing
Study abroad through language and culture strategies: Research on students,
study abroad program professionals, and language instructors. Final Report to
the International Research and Studies Program, Office of International
Education, DOE. Minneapolis, MN: Center for Advanced Research on Language
Acquisition, University of Minnesota. Retrieved from
www.carla.umn.edu/maxsa/documents/MAXSAResearchReport.pdf
Cohen, A. & Shively, R. L. (2002). Measuring speech acts with multiple rejoinder DCTs.
Language Testing Update, 32, 39-42.
Fantini, A. (2009). Assessing intercultural competence. In D. K. Deardorff (Ed.), The
SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence (pp. 456-476). Los Angeles, CA:
Sage.
Deardorff, D. K. (2004). The identification and assessment of intercultural competence
as a student outcome of internationalization at institutions of higher education in
the United States (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). North Carolina State
University, Raleigh.
Deardorff, D. K. (2006). Identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a
student outcome of internationalization. Journal of Studies in International
Education, 10, 241-266. doi:10.1177/1028315306287002

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

97

Mehmet Kanik

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

Deardorff, D. K. (2009). Implementing intercultural competence assessment. In D. K.

Deardorff (Ed.), The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence (pp. 477-491).
Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Deardorff, D. K. (2011). Assessing intercultural competence. New Directions for Institutional
Research, 149, 65-79. doi:10.1002/ir
Golato, A. (2003). Studying compliment responses: A comparison of DCTs and recordings of
naturally occurring talk. Applied Linguistics, 24(1), 90-121.
Hinkel. E. (1997). Appropriateness of advice: DCT and multiple choice data. Applied
Linguistics, 18(1), 1-26.
Hudson, T., Detmer, E., Brown, J. D. (1995). Developing prototypic measures of crosscultural pragmatics. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.
Johnston, B., Kasper, G. & Ross, S. (1998). Effect of rejoinders in production questionnaires.
Applied Linguistics, 19(2), 157-182.
Kanik, M. (2011). The effect of content instruction in L2 on L1 pragmatics. Research in
Language, 9(2), 93-110. doi: 10.2478/v10015-011-0017-x
Leech, G. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
McNAmara, T. & Roever, C. (2006). Language testing: The social dimension. Language
Learning, 56 (Supplement 2).
Roever, C. (2006). Validation of a web-based test of ESL pragmalinguisitics. Language Testing,
23, 229-256.
Rose, K. R. (1992). Speech acts and questionnaires: The effect of hearer response.
Journal of Pragmatics, 17(1), 49-62.
Rose, K. R. (1994). On the validity of discourse completion tests on non-western contexts.
Applied Linguistics, 15(1), 1-14.
Rose, K. R. & Ono, R. (1995). Eliciting speech act data in Japanese: The effect of questionnaire
type. Language learning, 45(2), 191-223.
Sasaki, M. (1998). Investigating EFL students production of speech acts: A comparison of
production questionnaires and role plays. Journal of Pragmatics, 30, 457-484.
Varghese, M. & Billmyer, K. (1996). Investigating the structure of discourse completion
tests. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 12(1), 39-58.
Yuan, Y. (2001). An inquiry into empirical pragmatics data-gathering methods: Written
DCTs, oral DCTs, field notes, and natural conversations. Journal of Pragmatics,
33(2), 271-292.
Zuskin, R. D. (1993). Assessing L2 sociolinguistic competence: In search of support
From pragmatic theories. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 4, 166-182.
98

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

Mehmet Kanik

Reverse Discourse Completion Tasks

APPENDIX A
Items in the reverse discourse completion task:
1.

Biliyorum baka bir ehirden geldiniz ama sizinle ilgili kararm netletirebilmem iin
haftaya tekrar sizinle grmek istiyorum. [I know that you came from another city but to
clarify my decision about you I need to see you again next week].
Durum: [situation]
____________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

2.

Yarn tefti var. Bugn temizlik iin mesaiye kalabilir misin? [There is inspection
tomorrow. Could you work overtime today for cleaning?]
Durum: [situation]
____________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

3.

Efendim, ok zr dilerim. Burada teknik ekibin acilen almas gerekiyor. Sizi baka
bir masaya alabilir miyiz? ? [Sir/madam, I deeply apologize. The technical team needs
to work here immediately. Could we move you to another table?]
Durum: [situation]
____________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

4.

Biliyorum proje teslimi iin son gn geldi ama ben yetitiremedim. Bana iki gn daha
msaade edebilir misiniz? [I know that today is the deadline for project submission, but I
could not finish it. Could you excuse me two more days?]
Durum: [situation]
____________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

CERCLL ICC Proceedings

99