Developing a Pragmatic Competence Assessment Tool for Nigerian ESL Learners: Theory, Design, and Validation

The assessment of pragmatic competence in Nigerian ESL contexts has been inadequately served by existing instruments developed in Anglo-American testing traditions that do not capture the pragmatic norms of Nigerian English or the specific interlanguage pragmatic challenges of Nigerian L1 learner populations. This dissertation develops, designs, and validates a pragmatic competence assessment tool specifically for Nigerian ESL learners, making original theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions. The theoretical contribution involves a principled specification of pragmatic competence constructs relevant to the Nigerian ESL context, drawing on interlanguage pragmatics, speech act theory, and recent discourse completion task research to identify the pragmatic knowledge dimensions most consequential for communicative success in Nigerian educational and professional contexts. The design contribution involves the construction of a multi-format assessment instrument combining a contextualized discourse completion task, an appropriateness judgment task, an audio-recorded oral role-play protocol, and a metapragmatic awareness component, with all items grounded in Nigerian English pragmatic norms rather than imported from Anglo-American corpora. The empirical contribution involves a three-stage validation study with two hundred and forty participants across three institutions in Abuja, Ibadan, and Kano, conducting construct validity analysis, criterion validity correlation with teacher ratings and conversational partner assessments, reliability analysis, and differential item functioning analysis across gender and L1 background. Validation results confirm the instrument's construct validity, acceptable reliability coefficients, and freedom from significant DIF effects. The tool is offered as a practically applicable assessment resource for Nigerian university English programmes. Keywords: pragmatic competence, assessment tool, validation, Nigerian ESL, interlanguage pragmatics.