8 Tips To Increase Your Pragmatic Game Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean

CLKs' awareness and ability to make use of relational affordances as well as learning-internal factors, were significant. RIs from TS & ZL, for example were able to cite their local professor relationship as a key factor in their pragmatic decision to avoid criticizing a strict professor (see example 2).

This article reviews all local pragmatic research on Korean published up to 2020. It focuses on practical important topics such as:

Discourse Construction Tests

The discourse completion test (DCT) is widely used in pragmatic research. It has numerous advantages however, it also has its disadvantages. For instance the DCT cannot take into account cultural and personal variations in communication. Furthermore it is also the case that the DCT can be biased and could cause overgeneralizations. Therefore, it should be analyzed carefully prior to using it for research or for assessment purposes.

Despite its limitations, the DCT is a useful tool for investigating the relationship between prosody and information structure in non-native speakers. The ability of the DCT in two or more stages to influence social variables that affect politeness could be a benefit. This ability can be used to study the effect of prosody across cultural contexts.

In the field of linguistics, DCT is among the most effective tools used to study the behavior of communication learners. It can be used to study many issues, such as the manner of speaking, turn-taking and the use of lexical terms. It can also be used to assess the phonological complexity of the learners speaking.

A recent study utilized the DCT to evaluate EFL students' ability to resist. The participants were given various scenarios and required to choose a suitable response from the choices provided. The authors concluded 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 used with caution and should include other data collection methods.

DCTs are often designed with specific linguistic criteria in mind, such as content and form. These criterion are intuitive and based on the assumptions of the test creators. They may not be precise and could misrepresent how ELF learners actually reject requests in real-world interactions. This issue requires further studies of different methods of assessing refusal competence.

A recent study has compared DCT responses to requests made by students through email with the responses gathered from an oral DCT. The results revealed that DCTs preferred more direct and traditionally indirect request forms and used hints less than email data.

Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)

This study examined 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 answered DCTs, MQs, and RIs. They were also asked to consider their evaluations and refusal performance in RIs. The results showed that CLKs frequently chose to resist native Korean pragmatic norms, and that their choices were influenced by four main factors that included their identities, their multilingual identities, ongoing lives, and their relational affordances. These findings have implications for pedagogy for L2 Korean assessment and teaching.

The MQ data were analysed to identify the participants' choices in terms of their pragmatics. 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 a sign of a pragmatic resistance. In addition, the interviewees were asked to explain their decision to use pragmatic language in a given scenario.

The findings of the MQs and DCTs were then analyzed using descriptive statistics and z-tests. The CLKs were found to use euphemistic words like "sorry" or "thank you". This was probably due to their lack of experience with the target languages, leading to a lack of knowledge of korean's pragmatic norms. The results showed that CLKs' preferences for converging to L1 or departing from both L1 as well as L2 pragmatic norms varies according to the DCT situations. In situations 3 and 12, CLKs preferred diverging from both L1pragmatic norms and L2 norms, while in Situation 14 CLKs preferred a convergence to L1 norms.

The RIs showed that CLKs knew about their logical resistance to every DCT situation. The RIs were conducted in a one-to-one manner within two days of the participants completed the MQs. The RIs were recorded and transcribing, and then coded by two coders who were independent. The code was re-coded repeatedly by the coders, re-reading and discussing each transcript. The coding results are then evaluated against the original RI transcripts to determine whether they reflected the actual behavior.

Interviews for refusal

One of the major questions in pragmatic research is why learners decide to rescind pragmatic norms that native speakers use. A recent study attempted to answer this question by employing a variety of research instruments, including DCTs, MQs and RIs. Participants included 44 CLKs and 46 CNSs from five Korean Universities. They were asked to perform the DCTs in their native language and complete the MQs in either 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 conform to the norms of native speakers in more than 40% of their responses. They did this even though they were able to create patterns that resembled native speakers. They were also aware of their pragmatism resistance. They attributed their resistance to learner-internal factors like their personalities and multilingual identities. They also spoke of external factors such as relational benefits. For example, they described how their relationships with professors facilitated an easier performance in relation to the linguistic and intercultural rules of their university.


However, the interviewees expressed concerns about the social pressures and penalties that they could be subjected to if they strayed from their local social norms. They were concerned that their native counterparts might view them as "foreignersand believe that they are incompetent. This concern was similar in nature to the one expressed by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).

These results suggest that native-speaker 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 reassess their relevance in specific scenarios and in various contexts. This will enable them to better comprehend how different environments could affect the practical behavior of L2 learners in the classroom and beyond. This will also help educators create better methods for teaching and testing Korean pragmatic s. Seukhoon Paul Choi is principal advisor for Stratways Group, a geopolitical risk consultancy based in Seoul.

Case Studies

The case study method is a research method that employs in-depth, participant-centered investigations to study a specific subject. It is a method that utilizes various sources of information to help support the findings, such as interviews or observations, documents and artifacts. This kind of investigation can be used to examine unique or complex topics that are difficult for other methods to assess.

In a case study the first step is to clearly define the subject as well as the objectives of the study. This will help you determine which aspects of the topic should be studied and which aspects can be left out. It is also beneficial to read the literature on to the subject to gain a broad knowledge of the subject and place the case in a broader theoretical context.

This case study was based upon an open-source platform, the KMMLU Leaderboard [50], along with its Korean-specific benchmarks HyperCLOVA X and LDCC Solar (figure 1 below). The results of the study showed that L2 Korean learners were extremely dependent on the influence of native models. They tended to select wrong answer options that were literal interpretations of prompts, thereby ignoring the correct pragmatic inference. They also showed a distinct tendency of adding their own words or "garbage" to their responses. This further reduced the quality of their answers.

Additionally, the participants in this study were L2 Korean learners who had achieved 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 for their next test. They were asked to respond to questions about their WTC/SPCC as well as understanding and pragmatic awareness.

Interviewees were presented with two hypothetical situations which involved interactions with their counterparts and asked to choose one of the strategies below to employ when making an offer. Interviewees were then asked to justify their decision. Most of the participants attributed their rational opposition to their personalities. For instance, TS claimed that she was difficult to connect to, and therefore refused to ask about the well-being of her friend with an intense workload, even though she believed that native Koreans would ask.