International Journal of Linguistics & Communication

How Spoken and Written Questionnaires Vehicle Comprehension
Abdullah Zughaibi

Abstract
This study examines the influence of task medium on the pragmatic comprehension of EFL learners. Students of an English language tertiary programme in Saudi Arabia each completed a pragmatic comprehension task using two different mediums (spoken and written mediums). Although participants could interpret implicit utterances in both tasks, they had lower overall scores when they completed the task through the oral medium. The results showed that participants scored significantly higher on the pragmatic reading task than the pragmatic listening task for all the variables examined. These findings suggest that the medium employed in pragmatic comprehension tasks can influence how well EFL students perform in these tasks and that listening tasks are not necessarily the best medium for assessing pragmatic comprehension.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/ijlc.v3n1a16