Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean
In addition to learner-internal influences CLKs' awareness of the need to be pragmatic and the social ties they were able to draw from were important. The RIs from TS and ZL for instance, cited their relationships with their local professors as a key factor in their pragmatic decision to avoid criticising a strict prof (see example 2).
This article examines all local pragmatic research on Korean published up to 2020. It focuses on pragmatic important topics such as:
Discourse Construction Tests
The test for discourse completion (DCT) is a widely used instrument in pragmatic research. It has numerous advantages, but it also has some disadvantages. For instance, the DCT is unable to account for cultural and individual differences in communication. 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 useful tool to investigate the relationship between prosody, information structure and non-native speakers. Its ability to use two or more stages to manipulate the social variables that are related to politeness could be a benefit. This ability can aid researchers understand the role of prosody in communicating across cultural contexts, which is a major issue in cross-cultural pragmatics.
In the field linguistics, DCT is among the most effective tools used to study the behavior of communication learners. It can be used to investigate various issues, including the manner of speaking, turn taking and lexical selection. It can also be used to determine the phonological complexity of the learners' speech.
Recent research utilized a DCT as a tool to assess the skills of refusal among EFL students. Participants were presented with a variety of scenarios to choose from, and then asked to select the appropriate response. The authors concluded that the DCT was more effective than other measures to stop people from refusing such as a questionnaire or video recordings. Researchers cautioned, however, that the DCT must be used with caution. They also recommended using other methods for data collection.
DCTs can be developed using specific language requirements, like design and content. These criterion are intuitive and based on the assumptions of the test creators. Highly recommended Internet site may not be accurate and may misrepresent how ELF learners actually reject requests in real-world interactions. This issue calls for more research into alternative methods of assessing the ability to refuse.
A recent study examined DCT responses to requests submitted by students via email versus those gathered from an oral DCT. The results showed that DCTs favored more direct and conventionally indirect request forms and used less hints than email data.
Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)
This study looked at Chinese learners their pragmatic choices when they use Korean. It used various tools for experimentation including Discourse Completion Tasks, metapragmatic questions, and Refusal Interviews. The participants were 46 CLKs of upper intermediate level who answered MQs, DCTs and RIs. They were also asked to think about their evaluations and refusal responses in RIs. The results showed that CLKs often chose to reject native Korean pragmatic norms. Their choices were influenced by four factors that included their personalities and multilingual identities, their current life experiences as well as their relational affordances. These findings have implications for pedagogy for L2 Korean assessment.
The MQ data was analyzed in order to determine the participants' actual choices. The data was classified according to Ishihara (2010)'s definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, the choices were matched with their linguistic performance in DCTs to determine whether they showed a pattern of resistance to pragmatics or not. Interviewees were also required to explain why they chose an atypical behavior in certain situations.
The results of the MQs, DCTs and z-tests were analyzed with descriptive statistics and z tests. The CLKs were found use euphemistic terms such as "sorry" or "thank you". This could be due to their lack experience with the target languages, leading to an inadequate understanding of the korean pragmatic norms. The results revealed that CLKs' preferences for either converging to L1 or diverging from both L1 and L2 pragmatic norms differed based on the DCT situations. In Situations 3 and 12 CLKs favored diverging from both L1pragmatic norms and L2 norms, while in Situation 14 CLKs favored convergence to L1 norms.
The RIs also revealed that CLKs were aware of their own pragmatism in each DCT situation. The RIs were conducted one-to-one basis within two days of participants completing the MQs. The RIs were recorded and transcribed, then coded by two coders from different companies. The coders worked in an iterative manner and involved the coders reading and discussing each transcript. The results of coding are contrasted with the original RI transcripts to determine if they captured the underlying pragmatic behavior.
Refusal Interviews (RIs)
The key problem in the field of pragmatic research is: why do some learners refuse to accept native-speaker norms? Recent research attempted to answer this question with a variety of experimental tools, including DCTs MQs and RIs. The participants were comprised of 46 CLKs, 44 CNSs and 45 KNSs from five Korean universities. Participants were required to complete the DCTs and MQs in their L1 or their L2. They were then invited to an RI, where they were required to think about and discuss their responses to each DCT scenario.
The results showed that CLKs on average, did not follow the norms of native speakers in more than 40% of their responses. They did this despite the fact that they were able to create patterns that closely resembled native speakers. They were aware of their practical resistance. They attributed their resistance to learner-internal variables such as their personality and multilingual identities. They also mentioned external factors, like relational benefits. They outlined, for instance, how their relations with their professors enabled them to function more easily in terms of the linguistic and social standards of their university.
However, the interviewees also expressed concern about the social pressures and punishments that they might be subjected to if they strayed from their social norms. They were worried that their native friends might perceive them as “foreignersand consider them unintelligent. This concern was similar to the concerns 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 still be useful for official Korean proficiency tests. But it is advisable for future researchers to reconsider their applicability in specific situations and in various contexts. This will help them better understand how different cultural environments could affect the practical behavior of students in the classroom and beyond. Additionally this will allow educators to develop more effective methodologies to teach and test the korea's pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi, principal advisor at Stratways Group in Seoul, is a geopolitical risk consulting.
Case Studies
The case study method is an investigational strategy that employs participant-centered, in-depth investigations to explore a specific subject. It is a method that uses numerous sources of data to help support the findings, such as interviews or observations, documents and artifacts. This kind of research can be used to examine specific or complicated issues that are difficult to other methods to assess.
The first step in conducting a case study is to clearly define the subject and the goals of the study. This will help determine which aspects of the subject matter are crucial to study and which are best left out. It is also helpful to review existing literature related to the subject to gain a broad understanding of the topic and place the case study within a larger theoretical context.
This case study was built on an open-source platform called the KMMLU Leaderboard [50], along with its Korean-specific benchmarks HyperCLOVA X, and LDCC Solar (figure 1 below). The results of the test revealed that the L2 Korean students were highly susceptible to native models. They were more likely to choose incorrect answers that were literal interpretations of prompts, deviating from the correct pragmatic inference. They also showed a distinct tendency of adding their own words or "garbage" to their responses. This also lowered the quality of their responses.
The participants in this study were L2 Korean students who had achieved the level of four in the Test of Proficiency in Korean TOPIK in their second or third year of university and were hoping to attain level six on their next attempt. They were asked questions about their WTC/SPCC, pragmatic awareness and understanding understanding of the world.
The interviewees were given two scenarios, each of which involved an imaginary interaction with their interactants and were asked to select one of the following strategies to use when making a request. They were then asked to explain the reasoning behind their choice. Most of the participants attributed their lack of a pragmatic response to their personalities. TS for instance said she was difficult to approach and was hesitant to inquire about the health of her co-worker when they were working at a high rate despite the fact that she thought native Koreans would.