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Adopting Linacre's guidelines for evaluating rating scale effectiveness, we examined whether and how a six-point rating scale functioned differently across raters, speech acts, and second language (L2) proficiency levels. We developed a 12-item Computerized Oral Discourse Completion Task (CODCT) for assessing the production of requests, refusals, and compliment responses among 109 examinees of L2 Chinese. Their oral productions were evaluated by two L1 Chinese raters based on a holistic rating scale simultaneously tapping communicative function, situational appropriateness, and grammaticality. Rating scale functioning differed across raters, speech acts, and proficiency levels. Such variations were caused by multiple factors: (1) the two raters interpreted the rating scale differently, (2) the generic rating scale was unable to represent the nuances in different speech acts, (3) the two proficiency groups drew on different portions of the rating scale, and (4) the rating scale categories were redundant due to an excessive focus on the descriptive rather than the interpretive function during rating scale development.

This study investigated the effects of intercultural competence and amount of social contact in the development of pragmatic knowledge. All these variables were time-varying variables and measured twice over a 3-month study abroad. Participants were 109 American college students studying Chinese in a semester study-abroad program in Beijing. Using Kelley & Meyers's (1995) instrument, intercultural competence--defined as one's potential to succeed in intercultural adjustment--was measured by 4 factors: emotional resilience, flexibility/openness, perceptual acuity, and personal autonomy. A survey was used to assess the amount of time spent on a variety of social activities in Chinese. Pragmatic knowledge was measured with a spoken task, which assessed participants' ability to produce speech acts (k = 24). Latent Growth Curve Modeling showed that cross-cultural adaptability and social contact, when combined, explained 26% of pragmatic gains. Cross-cultural adaptability had no significant direct effect to speech acts gains: It had indirect effects through social contact.

Participants were 109 American college students studying Chinese in a study-abroad programme in Beijing. Following Kelley and Meyer, intercultural competence was defined as cross-cultural adaptability involving four dimensions (emotional resilience, flexibility/openness, perceptual acuity and personal autonomy) and was measured with a survey. A language contact questionnaire was used to document the amount of time spent on social activities. Language proficiency was measured with a standardised Chinese test. Results revealed that intercultural competence and language contact combined explained 37.7% of the proficiency gains. Language contact had direct effects on proficiency, but intercultural competence had indirect effects, mediated by language contact.