Placing Oneself in the Reader’s Shoes: Developing Pragmatic Awareness of Perlocutionary Acts

The chapter examines how university lecturers, native speakers of English, judged the perceived adequacy (i.e. effectiveness and appropriateness) of written thanks elicited from EFL learners. Using a bottom-up approach, assessment categories were identified inductively, and then classified into themes, which were relevant to the addressee's perception of and envisaged reactions to the texts. The student texts were also assessed quantitatively and qualitatively along various formal, strategic and content-related parameters, and examined for their lexico-grammatical accuracy.