Five Pragmatic Lessons From The Professionals
Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean
In addition to the learner-internal aspects, CLKs' awareness of pragmatic resistance and the relational affordances they were able to draw from were important. For instance the RIs from TS and ZL both mentioned their relationships with their local professors as a significant reason for them to choose to not criticize an uncompromising professor (see the second example).
This article reviews all local practical research on Korean up to 2020. It focuses on pragmatic fundamental topics like:
Discourse Construction Tests (DCTs)
The discourse completion test (DCT) is a widely used instrument in pragmatic research. It has many advantages, but it also has some disadvantages. The DCT is one example. It cannot account cultural and individual variations. Additionally the DCT is susceptible to bias and may lead to overgeneralizations. Therefore, it should be analyzed carefully before using it for research or for assessment purposes.
Despite its limitations the DCT can be a useful instrument to study the relationship between prosody, information structure, and non-native speakers. The ability of the DCT in two or more stages to alter the social variables that are related to politeness is a plus. This feature can be used to study the role of prosody across cultural contexts.
In the field of linguistics, DCT is one of the most effective tools used to analyze the communication habits of learners. It can be used to examine various aspects that include the manner of speaking, turn taking and lexical selection. It can also be used to determine the phonological difficulty of learners their speech.
A recent study employed a DCT to assess EFL students' ability to resist. Participants were presented with a range of scenarios to choose from and then asked to select the appropriate response. The authors found the DCT to be more efficient than other methods of refusal, such as the use of a questionnaire or video recordings. However, the researchers cautioned that the DCT should be used with caution and should include other methods for collecting data.
DCTs are typically created with specific linguistic requirements in mind, like content and form. These criteria are based on intuition and based on the assumptions of the test designers. They are not necessarily correct, and they could misrepresent the way that ELF learners actually resist requests in actual interactions. This issue calls for further research on alternative methods of assessing refusal competency.
In a recent study DCT responses to student requests via email were compared to the responses of an oral DCT. The results revealed that DCT promoted more direct and conventionally indirect request forms, and a lesser use of hints than the email data did.
Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)
This study investigated Chinese learners' pragmatic choices when using Korean. It used various experimental tools including Discourse Completion Tasks, metapragmatic questions, and Refusal Interviews. The participants were 46 CLKs of upper-intermediate level who responded to MQs, DCTs and RIs. They were also required to provide reflections on their evaluations and refusals in RIs. The results revealed that CLKs often chose to defy native Korean pragmatic norms. Their choices were influenced by four factors: their personalities and multilingual identities, their ongoing life experiences, as well as their relationships. These findings have pedagogical consequences for L2 Korean assessment.
The MQ data was analyzed first to identify the participants' actual choices. The data were categorized according to Ishihara's (2010) definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, the responses were compared with their linguistic performance in the DCTs to determine whether they showed a pattern of resistance to pragmatics or not. The interviewees were asked to explain their choice of pragmatic behavior in a particular scenario.
The results of the MQs and DCTs were then analyzed using 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 of familiarity with the target languages, which led to a lack of understanding of the korean 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. In situations 3 and 12, CLKs preferred diverging from both L1pragmatic norms - and L2-pragmatic norms while in Situation 14, CLKs preferred convergence to L1 norms.
The RIs revealed that CLKs knew about their practical resistance to each DCT situation. The RIs were conducted in a one-to-one manner within two days after the participants had completed the MQs. The RIs were transcribed and recorded by two independent coders, were then coded. 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 how well they captured the underlying pragmatic behavior.
Refusal Interviews
The key problem in the field of pragmatic research is: Why do some learners refuse to accept native-speaker norms? Recent research sought to answer this question by using various 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 asked to complete the DCTs and MQs in their L1 or L2. Then they were invited to attend a RI where they were asked to think about their responses to the DCT situations.
The results showed that CLKs on average, did not follow the patterns of native speakers in more than 40 percent of their responses. They did this even though they were able to produce patterns that resembled natives. In addition, they were aware of their pragmatism. They attributed their choice to learner-internal factors like their personalities and multilingual identities. They also mentioned external factors, such as relational affordances. They described, for example, how their interactions with their professors helped them to perform better in terms of the linguistic and cultural norms at their university.
The interviewees expressed concern about the social pressures or penalties they could face if their local social norms were violated. They were worried that their local friends might consider them "foreigners" and believe that they are unintelligent. This was a concern similar to the concerns expressed by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).
These findings suggest that native-speakers' pragmatic norms are not the norm for Korean learners. They may still be useful for official Korean proficiency tests. But it would be prudent for future researchers to reconsider their relevance in specific scenarios and in different cultural contexts. This will enable them to better understand how different cultural environments could affect the practical behavior of students in the classroom and beyond. Moreover this will allow educators to develop more effective methodologies to teach and test korea pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi is principal advisor to Stratways Group, a geopolitical risk consulting firm based in Seoul.
Case Studies
The case study method is an investigative strategy that relies on participant-centered, deep studies to study a specific subject. It is a method that uses numerous sources of data to help support the findings, such as interviews and observations, documents, and artifacts. This kind of investigation can be used to examine specific or complicated subjects that are difficult for other methods to assess.
In a case study the first step is to clearly define the subject and the purpose of the study. This will help determine which aspects of the subject matter are crucial for investigation and which ones could be left out. It is also beneficial to read the literature on to the topic to gain a better understanding of the topic and place the case in a broader 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 showed 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 an unnatural tendency to include their own text, or "garbage," to their responses, which further hampered their response quality.
The participants of this study were L2 Korean students who had attained the level of four in the Test of Proficiency in Korean TOPIK in their second or third year at university and hoped to attain level six on their next attempt. They were questioned about their WTC/SPCC, pragmatic awareness, understanding understanding of the world.
Interviewees were presented with two hypothetical situations that involved interaction with their counterparts and were asked to choose one of the strategies below to employ when making a demand. The interviewees were then asked to justify their choice. Most of the participants attributed their pragmatism to their personalities. 프라그마틱 공식홈페이지 for instance said she was difficult to get along with and would not ask about the wellbeing of her colleague when they were working at a high rate, even though she believed native Koreans would.