Although there are studies on the pragmatic
assessment, to date no research has been done on native
English raters’ criteria for the assessment of EFL learners’
pragmatic competence. Focusing on this topic, this study
pursued two purposes. The first one was to find the criteria
for rating the speech act of apology in L2 by native English
teachers. The second was to investigate whether there was
rater bias in native English teachers’ rating of apology. To
this end, 51 native English teachers rated six different
pragmatic situations for an apology discourse completion
task (DCT) which were accompanied by an L2 learner’s
response to each situation. Besides rating, the raters were
asked to describe the way they rated the response to each
DCT situation. The content analysis of raters’ descriptions
revealed five criteria they mostly applied in their rating:
expression of apology, situation explanation, repair offer,
promise for future, and politeness. FACETS was used to
find the rater bias. Results indicated that raters showed
different degrees of severity and leniency in their ratings,
which contradicts the myth of native speakers being a
benchmark in language assessment, including pragmatic
assessment

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• Criteria and Bias in Native English Teachers’ Assessment of L2 Pragmatic Appropriacy: Content and FACETS Analyses