Written Discourse Completion Tasks in the Foreign Language Examination (YDS)

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) has been mostly taken by academic staff, undergraduate and graduate students, state employees, and military personnel for years in Turkey. The current study set out to address multiple-choice written discourse 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 tests and its components, such as sociolinguistics, sociocultural, psychological, contextual, and rhetorical meanings to disclose whether they can represent functional language use in high context communications. Findings reveal that a huge gap subsists between real-life situations and given tasks in the test. At the end of the fine-grained inspection, implications and future research suggestions are stated to ensure validity and involve speaking skill more directly in YDS by emphasizing what to touch and expressly centre on the speech rather than solely assessing examinees' knowledge for recognition and appealing to multiple-choice items with the analysis of international, large-scale language tests, such as TOEFL and IELTS.