PRAGMATIC ERROR IDENTIFICATION IN A COMPUTERADAPTIVE TEST OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

This paper analyses the reasons why a group of students fails the specific items that assess the pragmalinguistic competence in English in the Oxford Online Placement Test (OOPT).
The work at hand aims to find out what deficiencies in their linguistic competence are involved in their production of errors in these items. The research has been carried out according to the students own perception and from a cognitive and meta-linguistic perspective. For this purpose, a retrospective questionnaire was designed and administered to forty-four students, taking an English course at the Facultat de Magisteri, Universitat de València (Spain). These students should certify a B1 level of English when finishing the course. The results showed that the most frequent source of errors in the pragmatic comprehension part of the OOPT was unawareness of some vocabulary contained in the dialogues corresponding to this part of the test.