Discourse-completion task

A Discourse-Completion Task (DCT) is a tool used in linguistics and pragmatics to elicit particular speech acts. A DCT consists of a one-sided role play containing a situational prompt which a participant will read to elicit the responses of another participant.

The instrument was originally developed by Shoshana Blum-Kulka for studying speech act realization comparatively between native and non-native Hebrew speakers, based on the work of E. Levenston.

DCTs are used in pragmatics research to study speech acts and find the medium between naturally occurring speech and scripted speech acts. In comparing role-plays to DCTs, role-plays are considered to elicit data more similar to naturally occurring speech acts, yet are considered harder to score, attributed to the influence of the interlocutors.

A discourse-completion task consists of scripted dialogue representing various scenarios, preceded by a short prompt describing the setting and situation. The prompt usually includes information on social distance between participants and pre-event background to help the participant construct the scenarios.

Levenston, E. (1975). Aspects of testing the oral proficiency of adult immigrants to Canada. In L. Palmer & B. Spolsky (Eds.), Papers on Language Testing 1967-1974. Washington: TESOL.

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