Shengtao Xie

Operationalizing Pragmatic Difficulty: Speech Act Hierarchy and the Appropriateness Gap in an AI-Generated Business English Oral Test

Large language models can now draft scenario-based test tasks on demand, which raises a validation question that has attracted little attention: does the difficulty of the generated tasks behave as the construct predicts? This study examined an AI-generated oral test of three business speech acts to establish whether t...