Grammatical Competency or Pragmatic Competency : An Examination of the Language Features Related to Proficiency Scores in Oral Interviews

The present study aimed to examine the impacts of two measures of language competency, grammatical and pragmatic competency, on proficiency scores in oral interviews. The participants of this study were 23 university students from South Korea and China. For the data collection, a semi-structured oral interview was administered to evaluate their oral English proficiency, and each student’s recorded interviews were evaluated again in terms of grammatical competency and pragmatic competency respectively, based on the provided rubrics. Further, another set of semi-structured interview was conducted to investigate what the test administrators considered to constitute the main features of oral proficiency. These scores were then subjected to a Pearson correlation to identify any relationship between proficiency scores and grammatical competency scores, as well as between proficiency scores and pragmatic competency scores. The results of this study illustrated that both grammatical and pragmatic competency scores showed high correlations with oral proficiency scores. However, pragmatic competency showed a higher correlation than grammatical competency, and a medium effect size was found between two correlation values. The findings of this study imply the importance of pragmatic competency in communication and necessity of instruction targeted at to enhancing students’ pragmatic competency in second language (L2) teaching.