Illuminating Pragmatic Proficiency: Corpus-Based Assessment of Implicature in Secondary Classrooms
This talk reports on a corpus-pragmatics approach to assessing pragmatic proficiency, focusing on implicature comprehension and production in high-school learners. Drawing on classroom corpora and public dialogue datasets, I operationalise implicature types (e.g., scalar, relevance, manner) and annotate learner responses with reliability checks. I then introduce a lightweight rubric that integrates frequency, felicity, and repair strategies, and compare human ratings with rubric-assisted scores. Results indicate that rubric-guided corpus prompts improve inter-rater agreement and surface teachable patterns (e.g., hedging, contrastive connectives) that predict successful implicature recovery. I close with classroom assessment tasks, open materials, and a roadmap for scaling the method in low-resource contexts.
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Relevance Researchers' Network 