Assessing Intercultural Pragmatic Competence in Chinese EFL Learners: An Integrated Framework Using Written Discourse Completion Tasks and Audio Role-Plays

Assessing intercultural pragmatic competence remains a methodological challenge in English as a foreign language (EFL) education. Although written discourse completion tasks (WDCTs) are widely used to investigate learners’ pragmatic knowledge, their capacity to represent the interactional and context-dependent nature of communication is limited. Role-play assessments offer opportunities to examine pragmatic performance in interaction, yet introduce challenges related to standardisation, scoring and contextual authenticity. Drawing on research in interlanguage pragmatics, intercultural communication and language assessment, this article proposes an integrated assessment framework combining WDCTs with interactive audio role-plays for Chinese university EFL learners. The framework distinguishes sociopragmatic judgement, pragmalinguistic realisation and interactional management while recognising that these dimensions are not equally observable across assessment modalities. A task specification, analytic scoring framework and staged validation strategy are developed to support future empirical implementation. Particular attention is given to contextual variation, intercultural agency, rating fairness and the risks of treating native-speaker conventions as universal standards. Rather than claiming that the proposed instrument has already been validated, this methodological article identifies the evidence required to evaluate its reliability, construct representation and interpretive usefulness. The framework offers a practical basis for investigating L2 pragmatic performance and for developing context-sensitive assessment practices across EFL educational settings.