Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean
CLKs' awareness and capacity to draw on relational affordances and learner-internal elements, were important. For instance, RIs from TS and ZL both cited their local professor relationships as a significant reason for them to choose to avoid expressing criticism of an uncompromising professor (see the second example).
This article reviews all local pragmatic research on Korean published up to 2020. It focuses on key practical issues, including:
Discourse Construction Tests (DCTs)
The Discourse Completion Test (DCT) is widely used in pragmatic research. It has numerous advantages, but it also has some disadvantages. The DCT for instance, does not take into account individual and cultural variations. The DCT can also be biased and lead to overgeneralizations. This is why it should be analyzed carefully before it is used for research or for assessment purposes.
Despite its limitations, the DCT can be a valuable tool for investigating the relationship between prosody and information structure in non-native speakers. Its ability to use two or more stages to influence the social variables that are related to politeness could be a benefit. This feature can help researchers understand the role of prosody in communicating across cultural contexts, which is a major issue in cross-cultural pragmatics.
In the field of linguistics the DCT is now one of the most important tools for analyzing learners' communication behaviors. It can be used to investigate a variety of issues that include the manner of speaking, turn taking and lexical choices. It can be used to assess the phonological complexity of learners' speech.
A recent study employed the DCT to assess EFL students' refusal skills. Participants were presented with an array of scenarios and required to choose a suitable response from the options provided. The authors discovered that the DCT to be more effective than other methods for refusing like the use of a questionnaire or video recordings. Researchers warned, however, that the DCT must be employed with caution. They also recommended using other methods of data collection.
DCTs are often designed with specific linguistic criteria in mind, such as the content and the form. These criteria are intuitive and are based on the assumptions of the test designers. They aren't always exact and could be misleading in describing the way ELF learners respond to requests in real-world interactions. This issue requires further research on different methods of assessing refusal competence.
A recent study has compared DCT responses to requests submitted by students through email with those obtained from an oral DCT. The results revealed that DCTs favored more direct and conventionally-indirect requests and utilized hints less than email data.
Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)
This study investigated Chinese learners making pragmatic choices when using Korean. It used a variety of experimental tools 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 consider their evaluations and refusal performance in RIs. 무료 프라그마틱 indicated that the CLKs often resisted native Korean pragmatic norms, and their choices were influenced by four primary factors such as their identities, their multilingual identities, ongoing life histories, and relational advantages. These findings have implications for pedagogy for L2 Korean assessment.
The MQ data were analysed to determine the participants' pragmatic choices. The data were categorized according to Ishihara's (2010) definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, the choices were matched with their linguistic performance on the DCTs to determine whether they were a reflection of pragmatic resistance or not. Interviewees were also required to explain the reasons for choosing the pragmatic approach in certain situations.
The results of the MQs and DCTs were then analysed using descriptive statistics and z-tests. It was found that the CLKs frequently used phrases like "sorry" and "thank you." This could be due to their lack of familiarity with the target language, which led to a lack of knowledge of korea pragmatic norms. The results showed that CLKs' preferences to diverge from L1 and L2 norms or to be more convergent toward L1 differed based on the DCT circumstances. For instance, in Situations 3 and 12, the CLKs preferred to diverge from both L1 as well as L2 pragmatic norms, whereas in Situation 14 they preferred converging to L1 norms.
The RIs revealed that CLKs knew about their practical resistance to each DCT situation. The RIs were conducted on a one-to-one basis within two days of the participants completing the MQs. The RIs, which were recorded and transcribed by two coders independent of each other, were then coded. The code was re-coded repeatedly by the coders, re-reading and discussing each transcript. The results of the coding process were compared to the original RI transcripts, which provided an indication of how the RIs accurately portrayed the core behavior.
Interviews for refusal
A key question of pragmatic research is the reason why learners are hesitant to adhere to pragmatic norms that native speakers use. A recent study attempted to answer this question using a variety of experimental tools, including DCTs MQs, DCTs and RIs. Participants included 44 CLKs and 46 CNSs from five Korean Universities. The participants were asked to complete the DCTs and MQs in their L1 or L2 levels. Then they were invited to a RI where they were asked to reflect on their responses to the DCT situations.
The results showed that CLKs, on average, did not adhere to the norms of native speakers in more than 40 percent of their responses. They did this even though they were able to create patterns that were similar to native speakers. They were also conscious of their own pragmatism. They attributed their choices to learner-internal aspects such as their personalities and multilingual identities as well as ongoing life experiences. They also mentioned external factors like relational advantages. They outlined, for instance, how their relationships with their professors allowed them to function more easily in terms of the linguistic and social standards of their university.
The interviewees expressed concern about the social pressures and penalties they could be subject to if their local social norms were not followed. They were worried that their native interactants might consider them "foreigners" and believe that they are incompetent. This was a concern similar to those voiced by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).
These results suggest that native-speaker pragmatic norms are no longer the default preference of Korean learners. They may remain useful as a model for official Korean proficiency tests. Future researchers should consider reassessing the applicability of these tests in different cultural contexts and specific situations. This will enable them to better know how different cultures may impact the pragmatic behavior of L2 students in the classroom and beyond. Additionally this will allow educators to develop more effective methodologies to teach and test korea pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi, principal advisor at Stratways Group in Seoul, is a geopolitical risk consulting.
Case Studies
The case study method is an investigative technique that employs participant-centered, in-depth studies to study a specific subject. This method utilizes various sources of data like documents, interviews, and observations, to confirm its findings. This type of investigation can be used to study complicated or unique topics that are difficult for other methods of measuring.
In a case study, the first step is to define the subject as well as the purpose of the study. This will allow you to identify what aspects of the subject must be investigated and which ones can be skipped. It is also beneficial to review existing literature related to the topic to gain a better knowledge of the subject and to place the case study in a broader theoretical context.
This case study was built on an open-source platform, the KMMLU Leaderboard [50] along with its benchmarks for Koreans, HyperCLOVA X and LDCC Solar (figure 1 below). The results of the test revealed that L2 Korean students were particularly vulnerable to native models. They were more likely to choose incorrect answer choices that were literal interpretations of the prompts, which were not based on accurate pragmatic inference. They also exhibited a strong tendency to add their own text, or "garbage," to their responses, further reducing the quality of their responses.
Moreover, the participants of this case study were L2 Korean learners who had reached level 4 in the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) at the end of their second or third year at university and were aiming for level 6 in their next attempt. They were questioned about their WTC/SPCC, pragmatic awareness, understanding and knowledge of the world.
Interviewees were presented with two hypothetical situations that involved interaction with their co-workers and were asked to choose one of the strategies listed below to use when making a demand. They were then asked to explain the reasoning behind their choice. Most of the participants attributed their lack of a pragmatic response to their personality. TS for instance, claimed that she was difficult to get along with and refused to inquire about her interlocutor's well-being when they were working at a high rate despite the fact that she thought native Koreans would.