Pragmatic 101: Your Ultimate Guide For Beginners
Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean
In addition to the learner-internal aspects, CLKs' awareness of the need to be pragmatic and the social ties they had access to were crucial. Researchers from TS & ZL for instance mentioned their relationships with their local professors as a key factor in their rational decision to avoid criticising a strict prof (see example 2).
This article reviews all local pragmatic research on Korean until 2020. It focuses on the most important practical issues, including:
Discourse Construction Tests (DCTs)
The test for discourse completion is a popular tool in pragmatic research. It has many advantages, but also some disadvantages. The DCT for instance, is unable to account for cultural and individual variations. The DCT can also be biased and result in overgeneralizations. It should be carefully analyzed before being used for research or assessment.
Despite its limitations the DCT is a valuable tool to investigate the connection between prosody, information structure and non-native speakers. The ability to alter social variables relevant to politeness in two or more steps could be a benefit. This feature can help researchers understand the role of prosody in communication across cultural contexts, a key 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 various issues, including politeness, turn-taking, and lexical choices. It can be used to determine the level of phonological sophistication in learners speaking.
A recent study utilized a DCT to evaluate EFL students' refusal skills. Participants were given a list of scenarios and asked to select an appropriate response from the options offered. The authors concluded that the DCT was more effective than other refusal measures that included a questionnaire as well as video recordings. Researchers cautioned, however, that the DCT must be employed with caution. They also suggested using other data collection methods.
DCTs can be designed using specific requirements for linguistics, such as design and content. These criteria are intuitive and is based on the assumptions made by the test developers. They are not always exact and could be misleading in describing the way ELF learners actually reject requests in real-world interactions. This issue calls for further study on alternative methods for assessing refusal competency.
A recent study has compared DCT responses to requests submitted by students through email with those gathered from an oral DCT. The results revealed that DCTs preferred more direct and traditionally indirect request forms and utilized hints less than email data.
Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)
This study investigated Chinese learners' pragmatic choices when using Korean. It employed various experimental tools such as Discourse Completion Tasks, metapragmatic questions and Refusal Interviews. Participants were 46 CLKs of upper-intermediate proficiency who gave responses to DCTs and MQs. They were also asked to reflect on their evaluation and refusal performance in RIs. The results indicated that the CLKs often resisted native Korean pragmatic norms, and that their choices were influenced by four primary factors such as their personalities, their multilingual identities, their ongoing lives, and their relational benefits. These findings have implications for L2 Korean assessment and teaching.
The MQ data were examined to identify the participants' pragmatic choices. The data was categorized according Ishihara (2010)'s definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, we compared their selections with their linguistic performance on the DCTs to determine if they were indicative of resistance to pragmatics. The interviewees also had to explain the reasons for choosing an atypical behavior in certain situations.
The findings of the MQs and DCTs were then examined using descriptive statistics and z-tests. The CLKs were found to use euphemistic words like "sorry" or "thank you". This is likely due to their lack of experience with the target languages, leading to a lack of understanding of korean pragmatic norms. The results showed that the CLKs' preference for converging to L1 norms or departing from both L1 as well as L2 pragmatic norms varied by the DCT situations. In Situations 3 and 12 CLKs favored diverging from both L1- and L2-pragmatic norms, while in Situation 14, CLKs preferred convergence to L1 norms.
The RIs showed that CLKs knew about their pragmatic resistance to each DCT situation. The RIs were conducted one-to-one within two days of the participants completed the MQs. The RIs, which were transcribed and recorded by two independent coders who then coded them. Coding was an iterative process, where the coders read and discussed each transcript. The results of the coding process are compared with the original RI transcripts to determine if they captured the underlying pragmatic behavior.
Interviews for refusal
The central problem in the field of pragmatic research is: why do some learners decide to not accept native-speaker norms? A recent study attempted to answer this question employing a range of experimental tools, including DCTs MQs, DCTs and RIs. The participants were comprised of 46 CLKs, 44 CNSs and 프라그마틱 정품인증 (bookmark-search.com) 45 KNSs from five Korean universities. The participants were asked to complete the DCTs and 프라그마틱 무료체험 프라그마틱 슬롯 추천버프 (Royalbookmarking.com) MQs in their L1 or L2 levels. Then they were invited to attend a RI where they were required to think about their responses to the DCT situations.
The results showed that CLKs, 프라그마틱 무료스핀 on average, did not follow the patterns of native speakers in more than 40% of their responses. They did this even though they were able to create patterns that were similar to native speakers. Furthermore, they were clearly aware of their pragmatic resistance. They attributed their resistance to learner-internal variables such as their identities and personalities as well as multilingual identities. They also spoke of external factors like relational affordances. For instance, they discussed how their relationships with professors facilitated more relaxed performance with respect to the intercultural and linguistic standards of their university.
The interviewees expressed concerns about the social pressures or consequences they might face in the event that their local social norms were not followed. They were worried that their local friends might consider them "foreigners" and believe they are not intelligent. This is similar to the one 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. Future researchers should consider reassessing the applicability of these tests in different contexts and in particular situations. This will allow them to better understand how different cultural environments may impact the pragmatic behavior of L2 students in the classroom and beyond. This will also help educators create better methods for teaching and testing Korean pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi is principal advisor for Stratways Group, a geopolitical risk consultancy based in Seoul.
Case Studies
The case study method is an investigational strategy that relies on participant-centered, deep investigations to explore a specific subject. This method uses multiple data sources including interviews, observations and documents, to prove its findings. This kind of investigation can be used to analyze specific or complicated issues that are difficult to other methods to measure.
The first step in a case study is to define the subject and the objectives of the study. This will help determine what aspects of the subject matter are essential for investigation and which ones can be omitted. It is also helpful to review the existing research to gain a broad knowledge of the subject and place the situation in a larger theoretical context.
This study was based on an open source platform, the KMMLU leaderboard [50] and its Korean-specific benchmarks, HyperCLOVA X and LDCC-Solar (figure 1 below). The results of the study revealed that L2 Korean students were highly vulnerable to native models. They were more likely to select incorrect answer options which were literal interpretations. This was a deviance from the correct pragmatic inference. They also had an unnatural tendency to add their own text, or "garbage," to their responses, which further hampered their quality of response.
Moreover, the participants of this case study were L2 Korean learners who had reached level 4 on the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) at their second or third year of university and were hoping to achieve level 6 in their next attempt. They were asked to answer questions about their WTC/SPCC as well as comprehension and pragmatic awareness.
Interviewees were presented with two scenarios which involved interactions with their co-workers and were asked to choose one of the strategies below to use when making a demand. The interviewees were asked to justify their decision. The majority of the participants attributed their lack of a pragmatic response to their personality. TS for instance stated that she was difficult to talk to and was hesitant to inquire about the health of her co-worker when they had a heavy work load despite the fact that she thought native Koreans would.