Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean
In addition to learner-internal influences CLKs' understanding of the need to be pragmatic and the relational affordances they could draw on were important. RIs from TS and ZL, for example were able to cite their relationships with their local professors as a major factor in their decision to stay clear of criticizing a strict professor (see example 2).
This article reviews all local pragmatic research on Korean published up to 2020. It focuses on pragmatic core topics such as:
Discourse Construction Tests (DCTs)
The test for discourse completion is a commonly used instrument in pragmatic research. It has many advantages, but also some disadvantages. For instance it is that the DCT is unable to account for cultural and personal differences in communication. Furthermore, the DCT is susceptible to bias and can cause overgeneralizations. It should be carefully analyzed before being used for research or assessment.
Despite its limitations, the DCT is a useful instrument to study the relationship between prosody and information structure in non-native speakers. The ability to alter the social variables that are relevant to politeness in two or more steps can be a strength. This feature can be used to study the impact of prosody in different cultural contexts.
In the field of linguistics, the DCT has become one of the most important tools to analyze learners' communication behaviors. It can be used to study various issues such as politeness, turn taking, and lexical selection. It can be used to assess phonological complexity in learners' speech.
Recent research used an DCT as an instrument to test the skills of refusal among EFL students. Participants were presented with a range of scenarios to choose from and were then asked to select the most appropriate response. The authors concluded that the DCT was more effective than other measures to stop people from refusing, including a questionnaire and video recordings. However, the researchers warned that the DCT should be used with caution and should include other types of data collection methods.
DCTs are often developed with specific linguistic criteria in mind, such as the content and the form. These criteria are intuitive and based on the assumptions of test designers. 프라그마틱 슬롯 체험 are not necessarily accurate, and they may misrepresent the way that ELF learners actually resist requests in actual interactions. This issue requires more research into different methods to assess the ability to refuse.
In a recent study, DCT responses to student requests via email were compared with the responses from an oral DCT. The results revealed that DCTs favored more direct and conventionally indirect request forms and used more hints than email data.
Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)
This study examined Chinese learners making pragmatic choices when using Korean. It used various experimental tools including Discourse Completion Tasks, metapragmatic questions and Refusal Interviews. Participants were 46 CLKs at the upper-intermediate who participated in DCTs, MQs, and RIs. They were also asked to provide reflections on their opinions and their refusals to participate in RIs. The results showed that CLKs often chose to defy native Korean norms of pragmatism. Their decisions were influenced primarily by four factors that included their personalities and multilingual identities, their current lives, as well as their relational affordances. These findings have pedagogical implications for L2 Korean assessment.
The MQ data were examined to identify the participants' pragmatic choices. The data were classified according to Ishihara's (2010) definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, the responses were compared with their linguistic performance on the DCTs to determine whether they were a reflection of pragmatic resistance or not. Additionally, the participants were asked to explain their choices of behavior in a particular situation.
The results of the MQs, DCTs and z-tests were examined using descriptive statistics and z tests. The CLKs were found employ euphemistic phrases such as "sorry" or "thank you". This is likely due to their lack of familiarity with the target languages, leading to an insufficient understanding of korean pragmatic norms. The results showed that CLKs' preference to diverge from L1 and 2 norms or to move towards L1 varied depending on the DCT situations. In Situations 3 and 12 CLKs preferred diverging from both L1- and L2-pragmatic norms, while in Situation 14 CLKs preferred a convergence to L1 norms.
The RIs further revealed that CLKs were aware of their own pragmatism in each DCT situation. The RIs were conducted on a one-to-one basis in the space of two days of participants completing the MQs. The RIs were recorded and transcribed, and then coded by two coders who were independent. The coders worked in an iterative manner, with the coders re-reading and discussing each transcript. The results of coding were compared to the original RI transcripts, which gave an indication of how well the RIs were able to capture the fundamental behavior.
Refusal Interviews
A key question of pragmatic research is the reason why learners decide to rescind native-speaker pragmatic norms. Recent research attempted to answer this question with various experimental tools, including DCTs MQs and RIs. Participants included 44 CLKs and 46 CNSs from five Korean Universities. They were asked to perform the DCTs in their first language and to complete the MQs either in their L1 or their L2. Then they were invited to attend a RI where they were asked to consider their responses to the DCT situations.
The results showed that CLKs, on average, did not follow the pragmatic norms of native speakers in more than 40% of their responses. They did this despite the fact that they could create patterns that resembled native ones. Furthermore, they were clearly aware of their pragmatism. They attributed their resistance to learner-internal variables such as their personalities and multilingual identities. They also referred to external factors such as relational affordances. They described, for example, how their relations with their professors enabled them to perform more comfortably in terms of the cultural and linguistic standards of their university.
The interviewees expressed concerns about the social pressures or consequences they could face in the event that their local social norms were violated. They were worried that their native interactants might think they are "foreigners" and believe they are incompetent. This is similar to the one expressed by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).
These findings suggest that native-speakers' pragmatic norms are not the norm for Korean learners. They could still be useful for official Korean proficiency tests. But it would be prudent for future researchers to reassess their applicability in specific situations and in different cultural contexts. This will help them better understand how different cultural environments can affect the pragmatic behavior of students in the classroom and beyond. This will also help educators develop better methods for teaching and testing Korean pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi is principal advisor at Stratways Group, a geopolitical risk consulting firm based in Seoul.
Case Studies
The case study method is an investigational strategy that employs participant-centered, in-depth studies to study a specific subject. It is a method that uses multiple data sources to support the findings, including interviews or observations, documents and artifacts. This type of investigation is useful for examining specific or complex subjects that are difficult to quantify using other methods.
The first step in a case study is to clearly define the subject matter and the purpose of the study. This will help you determine what aspects of the subject must be investigated and which can be omitted. It is also beneficial to study the literature to gain a better understanding of the subject and place the situation in a larger theoretical context.
This study was based on an open source platform that is the KMMLU leaderboard [50] and its specific benchmarks for Korea, HyperCLOVA X and LDCC-Solar (figure 1 below). The results of the test revealed that L2 Korean students were particularly susceptible to native models. They tended to choose wrong answers that were literal interpretations. This was a deviance from a precise pragmatic inference. They also had a strong tendency to add their own text or "garbage" to their responses. This further reduced the quality of their responses.
The participants of this study were all L2 Korean students who had achieved level four on the Test of Proficiency in Korean TOPIK in their third or second year of university and were hoping to achieve level six on their next attempt. They were asked to answer questions regarding their WTC/SPCC, as well as pragmatic awareness and comprehension.
The interviewees were given two situations, each involving a hypothetical interaction with their co-workers and were asked to select one of the following strategies when making a request. They were then asked to provide the reasoning behind their choice. Most of the participants attributed their rational opposition to their personality. For example, TS claimed that she was hard to get close to, and she therefore did not want to inquire about the health of her interlocutors despite having a heavy workload, even though she believed that native Koreans would ask.