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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 (2014) 923 - 933
WCLTA 2013
Macrolinguistic Errors in Arab EFL Learners' Essays
Shehdeh Fareh a
a University of Sharjarh, Sharjah, UAE
Abstract
This study attempts to identify the errors that Arab EFL learners commit in writing English essays at the macrolinguistic level. It also tries to determine the causes of these problems and propose remedial strategies. More specifically stated the study seeks answers to the following questions: (1) What errors do Arab learners of English commit in writing English essays at the pragmatic and discoursal levels? (2) What are the possible causes of these errors? (3) How can such problems be minimized? and (4) To what extent do English language textbooks contribute to such problems? Five hundred essays and the contents of eight EFL textbooks were analysed for the purpose of this study. The findings revealed that Arab learners of English encounter major macrolinguistic problems in writing English essays, including coherence problems, cohesion problems, unawareness of logical relations between sentences, run-on sentences, poor paragraph development, and violation of the maxims of the cooperative principle. It was also found that teaching materials and the writing activities used in teaching English do not adequately develop students' pragmalinguistic competence. Finally, the study identified a few potential causes of these problems and proposed a number of strategies that may help learners and teachers overcome such difficulties.
© 2014 Publishedby ElsevierLtd. Thisisanopen access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-reviewunderresponsibilityof theOrganizingCommitteeofWCLTA2013.
Keywords: Arab EFL learners, macrolinguistic errors, discoursal and pragmatic problems, role of textbooks;
Introduction
Developing foreign language learners' competence in writing entails teaching them a number of sub-skills ranging from the mechanics of writing to sentence and discourse skills. Second language learners often develop an adequate grammatical competence without equal discourse and pragmatic competences.
Corresponding Author: Shehdeh Fareh E-mail: shehdehfareh@gmail.com
1877-0428 © 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of WCLTA 2013. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.05.161
Acquiring writing skills is one of the most complex processes in foreign language learning because of a number of factors. The insufficient exposure to the target language that is usually minimized to a few hours a week usually hinders the development of the learners' communicative competence. This difficulty is aggravated by the fact that EFL teachers do not often accord adequate attention to developing learners discourse and pragmatic abilities in writing. Instead, they focus on correct language structures, spelling and punctuation. This tendency might be ascribed to the fact that EFL teachers find it easier to focus on teaching at the micro-linguistic level, i.e. the mechanics of writing, spelling, punctuation and sentence structure rather than teaching at the discourse and pragmatic levels. Furthermore, this practice is often indirectly encouraged by the testing techniques and policies adopted in public schools, where the focus is usually on producing grammatically correct sentences that are free from spelling and punctuation mistakes. The outcomes of this process are usually undesirable and purpose defeating since this practice does not turn out communicatively competent language users, particularly in written expression. As a result, curriculum designers and textbook writers have become increasingly aware of the need to develop the foreign language learners' discourse and pragmatic competences as major components of the overall communicative competence. For example, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2002) states that the major goal of teaching a foreign language should be the development of learners' communicative competence, which incorporates three major components: linguistic competences, sociolinguistic competences, and pragmatic competences (p.108). Pragmatic competences are concerned with the functional use of linguistic resources. They include the proper production of language in context, speech acts, and language functions. Furthermore, pragmatics is also concerned with discoursal features of texts and conversations such as cohesion, reference, coherence, politeness, cooperation in conversation as well as turn-taking conventions.
Richards (2006:3) holds that communicative competence is the ability "to use the language for meaningful communication" and it includes the abilities to know how to:
• use language for different purposes and functions
• vary our use of language according to the setting and the participants
• produce and understand different types of texts
• maintain communication despite having limitations in one's language knowledge
It is clear that Richard's definition of communicative competence includes discourse competence that is often defined as the ability to interpret and produce stretches of language that go beyond the sentence level. Canale and Swain (1980), and Canale (1983) hold that discourse competence is concerned with the cohesion and coherence of utterances/sentences. It is the ability to understand, create and develop stretches of language that are longer than a sentence such as paragraphs, essays, short stories, conversations and dialogues.
2. Literature review
The performance of EFL learners in writing has been investigated by many researchers in different languages. For example, Hackling (1991:13-28) analysed the errors committed by Japanese students in writing English to determine which errors were the most frequent and most serious at the sentence level. He found that errors in tense were the least serious. Kim and Kim (2005: 68-89) identified four major types of problems in Korean university writing classes: emphasis on grammatical form, overemphasis on final product, lack of genre-specific across the curriculum and the need for more diverse types of feedback. These problems usually interfere with the students' intention to reach their full potential.
The performance of Arab learners of English in writing has also been extensively investigated. However, most of those studies examined the problems at the sentence level, focusing on grammatical correctness, problems in tenses, prepositions, the mechanics of writing, and the causes of weakness. For example, Abi Samra (2003: 1-4) conducted a study to identify, describe, categorize, and diagnose Arabic speakers' errors in English essays. Her ultimate purpose was to determine the sources of those errors and propose remediation techniques. She managed to identify a number of error types: substance (mechanics and spelling), semantic errors, lexical errors, and syntactic errors. The problems that Arab EFL learners encounter in writing English and the causes of these difficulties were
investigated by many other researchers such as Al-Khuweileh and Al-Shoumali (2000), Al-Jamhoor, A. (2001), Al-Hazmi, S. (2006) and Umair (2011).
Umair (2011), For example, conducted a study to identify the causes of the problems that Arab learners of English encounter in multi-ability academic English writing classes. The author found that the problems that EFL Arab learners encounter in writing composition can be partly ascribed to the organization of teaching materials and resources, time allocated to teaching English per week, students' attitudes and differences in their level of understanding. Furthermore, Ezza (2010) conducted a study in order to examine the effect of educational policies on the quality of the students' writing. He found that the weakness in the writings of Arab learners' of English is not always due to an inherent weakness in the students. Educational policies pertaining to the number of students in each class and the use of outdated teaching methods are factors that lead to poor writing quality.
3. Rationale and Objectives 3.1 Rationale
The significance of this study stems from the following aspects:
• This study aims at investigating the discourse and pragmatic problems in the compositions of Arab learners of English, a rather neglected area.
• The findings may have practical implications to teaching writing skills, especially at the discourse level.
• It may raise teachers' awareness of the pragmatic and discourse features that they need to give priority to in teaching writing.
• The findings of such a study may help in developing a checklist for evaluating the writing of EFL learners, especially with regard to assessing the discourse and pragmatic competences.
• The study is expected to suggest causes of the difficulties that Arab EFL learners encounter in writing English.
• The study offers direct implications to EFL textbook writers and curriculum designers.
• Discourse and pragmatic violations constitute a major cause of cross-cultural communication breakdown. Therefore, a study that sheds light on such problems is highly recommended.
3.2. Objectives
This study attempts to identify the discourse and the pragmatic inadequacies in the compositions written by University Arab learners of English. It also tries to shed light on the causes of these inadequacies and propose remedial procedures. It is an attempt to answer the following questions:
1. What problems do Arab learners of English encounter in writing English at the levels of discourse and pragmatics?
2. What are the possible causes of these errors?
3. How can such problems be minimized?
4. To what extent do English language textbooks contribute to such problems?
4. Methodology
4.1 Subjects of the study
The subjects of the study are university freshmen and sophomores who are enrolled in different majors at the University of Sharjah. Five hundred male and female students' written paragraphs and essays were collected from writing classes such as Academic English 1 and Academic English 2, where the focus of instruction was
on developing reading and writing skills. These students completed 12 years of study in public and private schools. All of them started learning English in grade 1. They also satisfied the university admission requirement that is attaining a TOEFL score of 500, or an IELTS score of 5.5.
4.2. Data elicitation
The written samples were randomly selected from more than fifteen sections of Academic English 1 and 2. The samples were either assignments that the students were asked to do at home or paragraphs and essays they wrote in class. In addition, the sample included 60 examination papers where students were asked to write essays.
4.3. Data Analysis
The written compositions were collected from the students through the help of the class instructors. The analysis procedure adopted in evaluating the students' compositions consisted of the following steps:
1. Detecting errors: Each essay was carefully read to identify any inadequacies at the discourse and pragmatic levels. Sometimes, it was difficult to determine that a sentence was pragmatically deviant. Therefore, native speakers were often consulted to determine certain suspected instances of deviation. In brief, detecting errors is the process of determining whether a sentence is erroneous or deviant from the norms.
2. Describing Errors: The errors were described in order to clarify how they deviate from the acceptable norms of writing. This step involves explaining why and how a certain form was deviant from acceptable norms.
3. Classifying errors: This process involves grouping similar errors together into larger groups so that they can be easily examined, discussed and accounted for. This step involves grouping errors in larger categories such as cohesion errors, coherence errors and pragmatic errors.
4. Explaining errors: In this step, an attempt is made to determine the sources/causes of errors. Errors may be found to be caused by mother tongue interference, inadequate teaching practices and teaching materials and textbooks, etc.
5. Quantifying errors: In this stage an attempt is made to determine the frequency of each type of error in order to establish a hierarchy of difficulty that helps us assess the seriousness of each type and decide how to make use of these errors in teaching.
6. Drawing conclusions and implications: the final step in the analysis of students' inadequacies is to look into the nature of such errors and their causes in order to come up with practical recommendations to improve the process of teaching writing to foreign language learners. This will ultimately increase the teachers' awareness of the significance of these errors and show them how to handle them in teaching writing.
5. Results and discussion
The analysis of the writing samples revealed the following types of inadequacies in the students' compositions. Each type will be illustrated by at least one example.
5.1. Discourse errors
1. Run-on sentences: Students sometimes tend to join sentences with each other, using a comma instead of a full stop or a semicolon. A whole paragraph sometimes has only one full stop at the end.
Example
• * Doctors perform surgery for many reasons, they might do it as a way of treatment, they want to correct some abnormal tissues.
This erroneous example shows that the students do not know some of the basic textual conventions pertaining to paragraph structure. They believe that a text is just a juxtaposition of sentences without being controlled by punctuation rules. This kind of error was very common in the sample compositions and it can be attributed to two causes or sources: negative transfer from the students' mother tongue, Arabic, and inadequate teaching of the skill of writing at schools. In Arabic, it is common to have a paragraph consisting of 7-10 sentences with only one full stop at the end. You can hardly find two or more Arabic sentences without being connected by a conjunction instead of a full stop. The second major cause of such a failure can be attributed to inadequate teaching practices of the writing skill. Teachers, very often, do not give adequate attention to the skill of writing and its components. Rather, their attention is usually focused on sentence structure, grammatical correctness and spelling.
2. Unawareness of logical relations between sentences: A paragraph consists of a number of sentences that develop one main idea that is usually expressed in the topic sentence. This main idea is referred to as the controlling idea that is further developed through supporting details. Very often, students produce a general statement at the beginning of a paragraph but they do not know which part of this statement is to be developed through supporting details.
Example
*Surgery, a method for treating diseases, is used for many important purposes in medicine and involves many stages. It is performed by cutting tissues with a scalpel, doing what is important, and finally stitching the incisions. Doctors perform surgery for many reasons.
These are the first sentences of the first paragraph a student wrote on a topic titled 'Purposes of Surgery'. Two major problems can be diagnosed in this paragraph.
A. The topic sentence is broad. It contains three general controlling ideas: use of surgery for treatment, the purposes of surgery and the various stages of surgery.
B. The second sentence of the paragraph is not logically related to either of the two ideas mentioned in the topic sentence. It is a digression because it is about the process or steps of conducting an operation in general, not about the purposes or stages of surgery.
These sentences also indicate that the student is not aware of the logical relations holding between sentences. Furthermore, he is not aware of the paragraph development patterns that require logical sequencing of ideas.
These problems may reveal the fact that such students were not properly taught how to develop a paragraph, and thus they are not familiar with the logical structure of paragraphs. In other words, students were not cognizant of the fact that sentences are the building blocks of paragraphs and essays and each one should perform a specific role in paragraph development; otherwise, it will be a digression that distorts the flow of the text.
3. Poor paragraph development: Students often fail to realize the form of a paragraph as a number of connected sentences that develop one major theme. Instead, they produce a number of separate and disconnected sentences that do not constitute a coherent unit. There is a tendency to divide a paragraph into three or more sections or sub-paragraphs by indenting each sentence.
Example
*Purposes of Surgery
Surgery is a medical procedure for both treatment and diagnosis. It has four major purposes.
The first purpose is treatment............
These are the major purposes of surgery.
This example shows that students do not know the form and the definition of a paragraph as a number of
interconnected sentences that develop one main idea.
4. Cohesion problems: Although cohesion was introduced in the mid-1970s after the publication of Halliday and Hassan's book Cohesion in English (1976), many EFL textbooks have not adequately focused on teaching cohesive devises. Therefore, EFL compositions were often evaluated on the basis of sentences in isolation without paying proper attention to the cohesion and coherence of the texts produced. A cohesive and coherent text is not merely a number of grammatically correct sentences juxtaposed one after another. Rather, it involves the use of cohesive devices such as reference, conjunction, ellipsis, substitution and lexical cohesion. In addition, a text should display continuity of senses and a smooth flow of ideas. Problems in creating cohesive texts can be classified into the following types:
A. Reference: Example
The first purpose is treatment, which are the removal of abnormal tissues and the repair of injuries through surgical methods. This would also help enhance the fixation of an abnormal structure to its original position.
The demonstrative pronoun 'This' has no antecedent, a matter which distorts the cohesion of the paragraph.
B. Overuse of pronominal reference Example
• My favourite toy was a stuffed animal. It was a ... . It was ... . It was covered with.....It was so
... . It used to ... . This made it ... .
The repetition of pronominal pronouns in such examples reveals the students' lack of familiarity with certain stylistic and textual features of English written discourse. This also implies that students were inadequately taught how to write well and develop ideas in a manner that conforms to the conventions of writing in English. The concept of cohesion seems to be absent in textbook exercises and in the teaching practice as well.
C. Omission of the relative antecedent
*A recent research has proved that children who fail in their studies are (??) who spend more time watching TV.
D. Changes in tense
Verb form can be used as a signal of cohesion in texts. Cook (2004:15) considers verb form a cohesive device in the sense that the verb form in a sentence determines the verb form in the next. A verb form in a sentence can be judged wrong because it does not fit the sequence of the forms of verbs used in the preceding sentences. Sometimes, Students unjustifiably shift from one tense to another in a sequence of sentences. Example
I have a toy at home. It is a teddy bear. I still kept it because it is the best toy I have ever had.
5. Improper use of inter-sentential connectives or discourse markers: Connectives play an important role in creating textual cohesion as they signal the logical relations that hold between sentences in a text. Furthermore, discourse markers as Garcia (2009) states "provide information on the learners' pragmatic competence in the target language. ." Discourse markers can signal sentential roles holding between sentences in a text. For example, the connective 'and' signals the relation of addition, whereas 'but' indicates a sentential relation of contrast between clauses. Students' very often misuse these connectives in the sense that a connective may be erroneously used to indicate a certain logical relationship between two clauses. Consider the following examples:
Example
• Our university has so many features that everybody registers on it. However (For example) our University has many good things such as good teachers that teach students in a good way.
These inadequate renditions of connectives imply that the learners are not aware of the correct use of such connectives because they were not properly taught or trained to use them. They indicate that the students do not exactly know that the connective 'however, for example indicates a relationship of contrast between two sentences. Sometimes, textbooks make the problem worse because they do not provide sufficient exercises on the use of discourse connectives and markers.
6. Coherence problems: Coherence is a textuality standard that means continuity of senses in a text. It results from a number of factors such as paragraph unity and sentence cohesion. A text or a paragraph is coherent when each sentence contributes to the development of the topic of a paragraph. A coherent text is easy to read and understand because there is unity of ideas between sentences and paragraphs. When a text lacks coherence, a reader very often finds himself forced to stop reading it because he cannot make a complete sense of it. Creating coherence in texts requires intensive and ongoing training in teaching writing. Most of the problems that students encounter in producing coherent texts are manifest in their inability to maintain information flow of senses in their paragraphs and texts. They move from one idea to another and thus render the text incoherent. Most EFL materials inadvertently fail to draw students' attention to the fact that information in texts should progress logically and coherently. In other words, a text should display thematic progression to qualify as text. Consider the following example:
The qualities of a good father Everyone has got lot of problems with his parents. Most people have the tradition of shouting at each other at home. This is something that doesn't change even if we are jealous when it seems like other people have the relationship with his parents that we always wanted. First of all something we like from anyone, and specially from a person who is close to you is to feel that person cares about you, about your interests.
This paragraph is supposed to develop the main theme of this paragraph, the qualities of a good father, but it has no single sentence that develops this theme. The reader of such a paragraph cannot tell what it is about. This means that it lacks coherence.
7. Absence of parallel structures: In a complex sentence that consists of two or more clauses, or in case of making a list of things, EFL learners sometimes list phrases or clauses that are not parallel in structure. This practice renders their writing awkward and incohesive because parallelism is a linking device in texts.
Example
• The steps of writing a paragraph are:
- selecting a topic
- gather information
- to write a draft
5.2. Pragmatic errors
Pragmatics or language use is not often included in foreign language teaching materials. That is probably why foreign language learners sometimes commit subtle mistakes that may not be accounted for in terms of syntactic accuracy. Such inadequacies render the students writing vague, awkward and disoriented. In this respect, Bardovi-Harlig and Dornyei (1998) hold that EFL learners and their teachers tend to overlook the effect of pragmatic failures, and consistently rank grammatical errors as more serious than pragmatic ones.
Pragmatic inadequacies may be noticed in various aspects. For example, the failure to use the proper polite formula in the appropriate context may be one of the serious pragmatic problems that an EFL learner may commit whether in speech or writing. Although the concept of politeness is universal, cultures express politeness differently. This is what sometimes causes EFL learners to be accused of being impolite because they may express something orally or in writing the way they do it in their native languages, but this expression
may not be so in the target language. These cultural differences in the expression of politeness necessitate the gradual incorporation of certain pragmatic components in the teaching process of foreign languages in order to avoid committing embarrassing mistakes, misunderstanding as well as communication breakdowns. Furthermore, pragmatic inadequacies may also be detected in the EFL learners' expression of directness and indirectness. There are sociocultural rules that determine the choice of being direct or indirect in a certain context. These rules are usually hard to grasp for non-native speakers, and thus they may be misinterpreted in certain situations. The use of the relevant target form whether direct, indirect, polite or impolite may be influenced by the learner's use of these forms in their mother tongue, the extent to which they feel comfortable in using such forms, the grammatical structure they may opt for, and whether or not they were taught to use them.
Violating the maxims of the cooperative principle may be among the major potential pitfalls for EFL learners. They may inadvertently violate the maxim of Quantity by providing more or less information than what is required. They may also provide information that is not relevant to the topic of conversation or writing, and in so doing; they violate the maxim of relevance. Furthermore, EFL learners may not express their messages vividly and unequivocally and thus they violate the maxim of manner which entails being clear and unambiguous.
Manifestations of pragmatic failures in the performance of EFL learners include the improper use of speech acts to convey certain language functions, turn-taking, improper address forms, and knowledge of contextual factors that usually determine the intent of the speaker in a conversation.
Pragmatic errors are manifest in words, expressions, sentences or even paragraphs that, though grammatically acceptable, do not fit the given situation, fail to express the intended meaning of the writer, or cause misunderstanding or displeasure to the targeted reader. Such errors violate certain principles of communication and consequently cause failure or disharmony in intercultural communication. The following are the major pragmatic inadequacies that were detected in the written compositions of Arab learners of English:
1. Mis-selection of lexical items
Due to their inadequate lexical competence, students sometimes use certain words in wrong contexts, a matter that renders the sentence vague and sometimes incomprehensible.
Examples: the erroneous forms are in bold and the corrections are in brackets.
• In summer, students are allowed to take only two materials (to enrol in two courses).
• Cholesterol is based on (caused by) eating lots of fats.
• So he gets under a special surgery to alter (replace) a broken bone.
2. Violation of the maxims of the Cooperative principle
A. Violation of the maxim of Quantity
The maxim of Quantity states that a speaker or writer should give the amount of information required to make his contribution meaningful. In this type of failure, students often add sentences and ideas that are not needed. This renders their writing repetitive, monotonous and less informative.
Example
Surgery, a method for treating diseases, is used for many important purposes in medicine and involves many stages. It is performed by cutting tissues with a scalpel, doing what is important, and finally stitching the incisions. Doctors perform surgery for many reasons.
Students were asked to write a paragraph on the purposes of surgery. The first sentence that is supposed to present the controlling idea includes a phrase that should not be there 'a method for treating diseases'. The second sentence is not related to the controlling idea of the topic sentence which is the purposes of surgery, and thus it is a digression and a violation of the Maxims of Quantity and Relevance as well.
B. Violation of the maxim of manner: Students sometimes tend to produce vague and fuzzy sentences that do not convey a specific meaning. In other words, they violate the maxim of manner that requires participants to make their contribution as clear as possible without ambiguity or vagueness.
Example
*A commonly known example that is associated with tumour size reduction that consequently does not lead to full recovery.
C. Violation of the maxim of Relevance: This maxim states that a participant should make his contribution relevant to the topic of conversation or writing.
Example: Students were asked to write a paragraph on the qualities of a good father.
The Qualities of a good father (1) Everyone has got lot of problems with his parents. (2) Most people have the tradition of shouting at each other at home. (3) This is something that doesn't change even if we are jealous when it seems like other people have the relationship with his parents that we always wanted. (4) First of all something we like from anyone, and especially from a person who is close to you are to feel that person cares about you, about your interests. (5) Fathers tend to simply ask their children about their lives because they think; they have to, not because they are really interested.
The first three sentences of this paragraph are irrelevant to the topic of the paragraph. They do not talk about the qualities of a good father. Even the last two sentences are not directly related to the topic on which the students were asked to write. Therefore, this paragraph is unfocused because it violates the maxims of relevance and quantity as well.
3. Overuse of qualifiers: Some foreign language learners tend to use certain words like 'very', 'extremely', 'fairly', 'somewhat' and so on. The use of such modifiers renders the student's writing vague. More semantically indicative words should be used instead.
Examples
'He was extremely happy', better to say 'He was delighted.
'She was somewhat annoyed' instead of 'irritated' or 'irked' or 'furious', depending on the degree of annoyance! 6. Causes of discourse and pragmatic failures
Although a researcher cannot be entirely sure of the cause or source of pragmatic and discourse violations in the written performance of learners of English as foreign language, he can still pose some potential causes that can be corroborated by some practical evidence. The following are some of these causes:
1. Absence of pragma-linguistic competence that constitutes a major component in EFL learners' overall competence. EFL teaching materials do not focus on language use as well as discourse and pragmatic competences. The survey of EFL textbooks revealed that the activities designed to develop this kind of competence are sporadic and inadequate.
2. L1 negative transfer may account for a considerable number of difficulties.
3. Unqualified teachers and inadequate teaching practices may also lead to poor performance on the part of the learners in all aspects of language learning.
4. Inadequate exposure to authentic texts in English. More often than not, the texts to which EFL students are exposed are not authentic and in many cases they are simplified, a matter that reduces the students exposure to the real language in use.
5. Lack of practice and guidance in writing paragraphs is a decisive factor that may account for the students' inadequate performance.
6. Methods of testing usually focus on microlinguistic aspects of language rather than on macro-linguistic ones.
7. Conclusions and recommendations
The macrolinguistic failures in the compositions of EFL learners can be minimized and their competence in these areas can be maximized by considering the following recommendations:
1. EFL teachers should be made aware of the differences between the rhetorical patterns of the learners' L1 and the target language. These differences should be highlighted, taught and sufficiently practiced.
2. Teacher-training programs should incorporate components on how to utilize cultural and linguistic-specific differences between L1 and L2.
3. Learners and teachers should be made aware of what pragmatic errors are so that they can be well prepared to handle such errors.
4. Textbook writers and curricula designers should incorporate adequate pragmatic content in EFL textbooks in order to develop the learners' pragmatic and discourse competences.
5. Learners' attention should be drawn to the pragmatic use of the target language by exposing them to exercises including error detection and correction. These activities should then be followed up with detailed explanations when students fail to do them correctly.
6. Language learners should be encouraged to maximize their exposure to the target language through extensive reading, listening and writing.
7. Classroom instruction should aim at enhancing students' pragmatic and discourse competences by focusing not only on the accuracy of linguistic forms, but also on the pragmatic and functional uses of language.
8. Testing and assessment techniques of the students' performance should incorporate components that assess the discourse and pragmatic competences of the learners.
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