EVALUATING CRITICAL DISCOURSE PROCESSING (CDP): BRIDGING LINGUISTIC PROFICIENCY AND SOCIO-PRAGMATIC LITERACY IN L2 TESTING

Conventional L2 assessments privilege grammar, vocabulary, and literal comprehension, implicitly treating texts as neutral containers of information. We argue that real-world proficiency requires Critical Discourse Processing (CDP) the cognitively constrained capacity to identify authorial intent, framing, stance, presuppositions, and source practices in often multimodal media discourse. Drawing on psycholinguistics of discourse, we define CDP as a measurable construct, translate it into assessment claims and evidence via evidence-centered design, and present practical task designs that elicit short, evidence-anchored justifications without inflating linguistic load. We outline scoring via analytic rubrics and modern psychometrics, and propose a validation program emphasizing reliability, construct coherence, predictive value, and fairness [1,2]. The result is an assessment strand that complements structural measures with socio-pragmatic literacy essential for contemporary communication