Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean
In addition to learner-internal factors, CLKs' awareness of pragmatic resistance and the relationship advantages they had access to were crucial. RIs from TS and ZL for instance, cited their relationships with their local professors as a key factor in their decision to stay clear of criticising a strict prof (see example 2).
This article reviews all locally published practical research on Korean up to 2020. It focuses on the most important pragmatic issues such as:
Discourse Construction Tests (DCTs)
The discourse completion test (DCT) is a widely used instrument in the field of pragmatic research. It has numerous advantages, but also a few disadvantages. The DCT for instance, is unable to account for cultural and individual variations. Additionally, the DCT is prone to bias and could cause overgeneralizations. It should be carefully analyzed before it is used for research or assessment.
Despite its limitations the DCT is a useful instrument to study the connection between prosody, information structure, and non-native speakers. The ability to manipulate the social variables that are relevant to the manner of speaking in two or more steps could be a strength. This ability can be used to study the role of prosody in various cultural contexts.
In the field linguistics, DCT is one of the most effective tools used for analyzing communication behaviors of learners. It can be used to study various issues, including politeness, turn-taking, and lexical choices. It can also be used to determine the phonological complexity of the learners speaking.
A recent study utilized the DCT to assess EFL students' refusal skills. Participants were presented with various scenarios and required to choose a suitable response from the options provided. The authors found that the DCT was more effective than other measures to stop people from refusing such as a questionnaire or video recordings. However, they cautioned that the DCT should be employed with caution and include other methods for collecting data.
DCTs can be developed using specific language requirements, like form and content. These criteria are based on intuition and based on the assumptions of test developers. They may not be exact and could be misleading in describing how ELF learners actually respond to requests in real-world interactions. This issue requires further studies of different methods to assess refusal ability.
A recent study compared DCT responses to requests submitted by students via email with the responses gathered from an oral DCT. The results revealed that DCT encouraged more direct and traditionally indirect request forms and a lower use of hints than 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. Participants were 46 CLKs of upper-intermediate proficiency who gave responses to MQs and DCTs. They were also required to provide reflections on their evaluations and their refusals to participate in RIs. 프라그마틱 순위 showed that CLKs often resisted native Korean pragmatic norms, and their decisions were influenced by four main factors that included their personalities, multilingual identities, ongoing lives, and their relational benefits. These findings have implications for pedagogy for L2 Korean assessment.
First, the MQ data were analysed to identify the participants' pragmatic choices. The data was classified according to Ishihara (2010)'s definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, we compared their selections with their linguistic performance on DCTs to determine if they were indicative of pragmatic resistance. In addition, the interviewees were asked to justify their choice of pragmatic behavior in a particular situation.
The results of the MQs, DCTs and z-tests were examined using descriptive statistics and z tests. It was found that the CLKs frequently used euphemistic responses such as "sorry" and "thank you." This could be due to their lack of familiarity with the target language, which led to a lack of understanding of korea pragmatic norms. The results revealed that CLKs' preferences to diverge from L1 and L2 norms or to converge towards L1 norms varied based on the DCT circumstances. In the scenarios 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 also revealed the CLKs were aware their pragmatic resistance in each DCT situation. RIs were conducted on a one-to-one basis in the space of two days of participants having completed the MQs. The RIs were transcribed and recorded by two coders independent of each other and then coded. The coders worked in an iterative manner and involved the coders reading and discussing each transcript. The results of the coding process were evaluated against the original RI transcripts, which gave an indication of how the RIs were able to capture the fundamental behavior.
Refusal Interviews (RIs)
A key question of pragmatic research is why some learners decide to rescind the pragmatic norms of native speakers. Recent research sought to answer this question with various experiments, including DCTs MQs and RIs. Participants comprised 46 CLKs and 44 CNSs from five Korean Universities. They were required to complete the DCTs in their native language and to complete the MQs either in their L1 or L2. Then they were invited to a RI where they were required to think about their responses to the DCT situations.
The results showed that on average, the CLKs rejected native-speaker pragmatic norms in more than 40% of their responses. They did so even though they could produce native-like patterns. Furthermore, they were clearly aware of their pragmatic resistance. They attributed their decisions to learner-internal factors like their personalities and multilingual identities as well as ongoing life histories. They also mentioned external factors, such as relational affordances. For example, they described how their relationships with professors helped facilitate a more relaxed performance with respect to the intercultural and linguistic norms of their university.
However, the interviewees also expressed concern about the social pressures and consequences that they might be subject to if they violated their social norms. They were concerned that their native friends would consider them "foreigners" and believe they are unintelligent. This was a concern similar to the concerns voiced by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).
These findings suggest that native-speaker pragmatic norms are no longer the default preference of Korean learners. They could still be useful for official Korean proficiency testing. Future researchers should reassess the validity of these tests in various cultural contexts and specific situations. This will enable them to 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 for teaching and testing the korea's 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 investigative technique that relies on participant-centered, deep investigations to explore a specific subject. It is a method that utilizes numerous sources of data to support the findings, including interviews or observations, documents and artifacts. This type of investigation is useful when analyzing complicated or unique subjects which are difficult to assess with other methods.
The first step in a case study is to clearly define the subject and the objectives of the study. This will allow you to determine which aspects of the subject matter are crucial to study and which can be omitted. It is also beneficial to review existing literature related to the subject to gain a broad knowledge of the subject and place the case study within a wider theoretical framework.
This study was based on an open-source platform called the KMMLU Leaderboard [50], and its Korean-specific benchmarks HyperCLOVA X, and LDCC Solar (figure 1 below). The results of this study revealed that L2 Korean learners were extremely susceptible to the influence of native models. They tended to select wrong answers that were literal interpretations of the prompts, which were not based on accurate pragmatic inference. They also showed a strong tendency to include their own text 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 level four on the Test of Proficiency in Korean TOPIK in their third or second university year and were aiming to achieve level six on their next attempt. They were asked questions about their WTC/SPCC, pragmatic awareness, understanding and perception of the world.
Interviewees were presented with two hypothetical situations that involved interaction with their counterparts and asked to choose one of the strategies below to employ when making a demand. The interviewees were then asked to justify their choice. The majority of participants attributed their pragmatist opposition to their personality. For instance, TS claimed that she was difficult to connect to, and therefore was reluctant to inquire about the well-being of her friend with a heavy workload despite her belief that native Koreans would do this.