Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean
In addition to learner-internal factors CLKs' awareness of pragmatic resistance and the social ties they had access to were crucial. RIs from TS & ZL for instance, cited their relationship with their local professor as the primary reason for their rational decision to avoid criticism of a strict professor (see example 2).
This article reviews all local pragmatic research on Korean published up to 2020. It focuses on practical core topics such as:
Discourse Construction Tests (DCTs)
The discourse completion test is a common tool in pragmatic research. It has many advantages but it also has a few disadvantages. For instance, the DCT cannot take into account the cultural and individual variations in communication. The DCT can also be biased and result in overgeneralizations. It should be carefully analyzed before it is used for research or evaluation.
Despite its limitations, the DCT can be a valuable instrument to study the relationship between prosody and information structure in non-native speakers. The ability to alter social variables relevant to politeness in two or more steps can be a strength. This feature can help researchers to study the role played by prosody in communication across different cultural contexts, a major challenge in cross-cultural pragmatics.
In the field of linguistics, the DCT is now one of the most important tools to analyze learners' behavior in communication. It can be used to investigate a variety of issues such as politeness, turn taking, and lexical selection. It can be used to determine the level of phonological sophistication in learners' speech.
A recent study employed a DCT to test EFL students' ability to resist. Participants were given a set of scenarios to choose from and then asked to select the most appropriate response. The authors concluded that the DCT was more effective than other refusal measures, including a questionnaire and video recordings. Researchers cautioned, however, that the DCT should be employed with caution. They also recommended using other data collection methods.
DCTs can be developed using specific language requirements, like form and content. These criteria are based on intuition and is based on the assumptions made by the test creators. They are not necessarily precise, and they could incorrectly describe the way in which ELF learners actually refuse requests in actual interactions. This issue calls for more research on alternative methods of assessing refusal competency.
In a recent study, DCT responses to student requests via email were compared with the responses of an oral DCT. The results revealed that DCTs favored more direct and traditionally indirect requests and utilized more hints than email data.
Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)
This study examined Chinese learners' pragmatic choices when using Korean. It used various tools for experimentation including Discourse Completion Tasks, metapragmatic questions and Refusal Interviews. Participants were 46 CLKs of intermediate or higher ability who responded to DCTs and MQs. They were also asked to provide reflections on their opinions and their refusals to participate in RIs. The results revealed that CLKs often resisted native Korean pragmatic norms, and their choices were influenced by four major factors such as their personalities, their multilingual identities, ongoing life histories, and relationship affordances. These findings have pedagogical consequences for L2 Korean assessment.
The MQ data were analyzed to identify the participants' choices in terms of their pragmatics. The data were classified according to Ishihara's (2010) definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, we compared their choices made by the participants with their linguistic performance on the DCTs to determine if they were indicative of a pragmatic resistance. The interviewees were asked to justify their decision to use pragmatic language in a given scenario.
The results of the MQs, DCTs and z-tests were analyzed with descriptive statistics and Z tests. It was found that CLKs often resorted to phrases like "sorry" and "thank you." This is likely due to their lack of familiarity with the target language, which led to an insufficient understanding of korea pragmatic norms. The results showed that CLKs' preference for converging to L1 or diverging from both L1 and L2 pragmatic norms differed based on the DCT situations. For example, in Situation 3 and 12 the CLKs would prefer to diverge from both L1 as well as L2 pragmatic norms whereas in Situation 14 they favored a convergence to L1 norms.
The RIs also revealed the CLKs were aware of their pragmatism in every DCT situation. The RIs were conducted in a one-to-one manner within two days after the participants completed the MQs. The RIs were transcribed and recorded by two coders independent of each other who then coded them. Coding was an iterative process, in which the coders read and discussed each transcript. The results of coding were evaluated against the original RI transcripts, which provided an indication of how the RIs were able to capture the fundamental behavior.
Refusal Interviews (RIs)
One of the major questions in pragmatic research is why learners choose to resist native-speaker pragmatic norms. Recent research sought to answer this question using a variety of experimental tools, including DCTs MQs and RIs. The participants consisted of 46 CLKs, 44 CNSs, and 45 KNSs from five Korean universities. Participants were required to complete the DCTs and MQs either in their L1 or L2. They were then invited to an RI, where they were asked to reflect and discuss their responses to each DCT situation.
The results showed that CLKs on average, did not follow the norms of native speakers in more than 40% of their responses. They did so even though they could create patterns that resembled native ones. In addition, they were aware of their pragmatic resistance. They attributed their resistance to learner-internal factors like their personalities and multilingual identities. They also mentioned external factors, such as relationships and benefits. They also discussed, for instance, how their relations with their professors enabled them to perform more comfortably in terms of the cultural and linguistic expectations of their university.
However, the interviewees expressed concern about the social pressures and penalties that they could be subjected to if they strayed from their local social norms. They were worried that their native friends might perceive them as “foreignersand consider them ignorant. 프라그마틱 공식홈페이지 pragmatickr was similar in nature to the concerns expressed by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).
These findings suggest that native-speakers pragmatic norms aren't the default preference for Korean learners. They may remain useful as a model for official Korean proficiency tests. But it is advisable for future researchers to reassess their relevance in specific scenarios and in various contexts. This will help them better understand the impact of different cultures on the classroom behavior and interactions of L2 students. This will also aid educators develop better methods for teaching and testing Korean pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi is principal advisor to Stratways Group, a geopolitical risk consultancy based out of Seoul.
Case Studies
The case study method is an investigational strategy that employs participant-centered, in-depth investigations to investigate a particular subject. This method uses various sources of data, such as documents, interviews, and observations, to confirm its findings. This type of investigation is ideal for studying specific or complex subjects which are difficult to assess using other methods.
The first step in a case study is to define the subject matter and the purpose of the study. This will help determine what aspects of the subject matter are essential to study and which could be left out. It is also useful to review the existing literature to gain a better knowledge of the subject and put the issue in a larger theoretical context.
This case study was built on an open-source platform, the KMMLU Leaderboard [50] and its benchmarks for Koreans, HyperCLOVA X and LDCC Solar (figure 1 below). The results of this experiment revealed that L2 Korean learners were highly vulnerable to the influence of native models. They tended to select wrong answer options that were literal interpretations of the prompts, thereby ignoring accurate pragmatic inference. They also exhibited an unnatural tendency to add their own text or "garbage," to their responses, further detracting from their quality of response.
Moreover, the participants of this case study were primarily L2 Korean learners who had achieved level 4 on the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) in their second or third year of university and were hoping to achieve level 6 for their next test. They were asked to respond to questions regarding their WTC/SPCC and comprehension and pragmatic awareness.
Interviewees were presented with two hypothetical situations that involved interaction with their interlocutors and asked to choose one of the strategies below to employ when making demands. They were then asked to explain the reasoning behind their choice. Most of the participants attributed their rational opposition to their personality. TS for instance said she was difficult to get along with and refused to inquire about the health of her co-worker when they had a heavy work load, even though she believed native Koreans would.