Özet:

As the most prestigious and popular standardized achievement test to certify examinees’proficiency of the English language at the national level, Foreign Language Examination (YDS) hasbeen mostly taken by academic staff, undergraduate and graduate students, state employees, andmilitary personnel for years in Turkey. The current study set out to address multiple-choice writtendiscourse completion tasks (WDCTs) in YDS from 2015 to 2019 in the light of pragmatic knowledge,seemingly presumed to be the elephant in the room by test-developers in written language placement testsand its components, such as sociolinguistics, sociocultural, psychological, contextual, and rhetoricalmeanings to disclose whether they can represent functional language use in high contextcommunications. Findings reveal that a huge gap subsists between real-life situations and given tasksin the test. At the end of the fine-grained inspection, implications and future research suggestions arestated to ensure validity and involve speaking skill more directly in YDS by emphasizing what to touchand expressly centre on the speech rather than solely assessing examinees’ knowledge for recognitionand appealing to multiple-choice items with the analysis of international, large-scale language tests, suchas TOEFL and IELTS.

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