Reliability and Validity of WDCT in Testing Interlanguage Pragmatic Competence for EFL Learners

Interlanguage pragmatic competence is of vital importance for the EFL learners because misunderstanding always occurs among people from different cultures. The present study aimed to develop an interlanguage pragmatic competence test in the field of speech acts with WDCT. Altogether 100 English major students and 33 native speakers in Guizhou University of China participated in the developing of the test, and another 60 English majors in Guizhou University of China took the test. The analysis of the reliability and validity of WDCT was based on Many Facets Rasch Model. The results showed that WDCT had both high reliability and validity in the Chinese context in testing the interlanguage pragmatic competence in speech acts performance.