10 Pragmatic Tricks Experts Recommend Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean

In addition to learner-internal factors CLKs' awareness of the need to be pragmatic and the relational affordances they had access to were important. For instance, RIs from TS and ZL both mentioned their relationships with their local professors as a significant factor in their pragmatic choice to avoid criticising the strictness of a professor (see the example 2).

This article reviews all locally published pragmatic research on Korean up to 2020. It focuses on the practical fundamental topics like:

Discourse Construction Tests (DCTs)

The test for discourse completion is a popular instrument in pragmatic research. It has numerous advantages, but it also has some disadvantages. For example, the DCT is unable to account for the cultural and individual differences in communicative behavior. The DCT can also be biased and lead to overgeneralizations. It should be carefully analyzed before it is used for research or assessment.

Despite its limitations the DCT is a valuable tool for analyzing the connection between prosody, information structure and non-native speakers. Its ability in two or more stages to manipulate social variables that affect politeness is a plus. This characteristic can be utilized to study the effect of prosody in different cultural contexts.

In the field of linguistics DCT is among the most effective tools for analyzing communication behaviors of learners. It can be used to examine various aspects that include politeness, turn-taking, and lexical selection. It can be used to determine the level of phonological sophistication in learners in their speech.

Recent research utilized an DCT as tool to evaluate the skills of refusal among EFL students. Participants were presented with various scenarios and asked to choose the appropriate response from the choices provided. The authors concluded that the DCT was more effective than other refusal measures, including a questionnaire and video recordings. However, the researchers cautioned that the DCT should be used with caution and include other methods for collecting data.

DCTs are often created with specific linguistic requirements in mind, such as content and form. These criteria are based on intuition and based upon the assumptions of test creators. They may not be accurate, and they may incorrectly describe the way in which ELF learners actually resist requests in real-world interactions. This issue calls for further studies of alternative methods of assessing the ability to refuse.

In a recent study DCT responses to student inquiries via email were compared to those from an oral DCT. The results revealed that DCTs favored more direct and conventionally-indirect requests and utilized less hints than email data.

Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)

This study investigated Chinese learners' pragmatic choices when using Korean. It employed various experimental tools including Discourse Completion Tasks, metapragmatic questions and Refusal Interviews. Participants were 46 CLKs of upper-intermediate level who responded to DCTs, MQs, and RIs. They were also asked to provide reflections on their opinions and their refusals to participate in RIs. The results revealed that CLKs often chose to resist native Korean pragmatic norms. Their choices were influenced by four factors: their personalities and multilingual identities, their current life histories and their relationships. These findings have implications for pedagogy for L2 Korean assessment.

The MQ data was first analyzed to determine the participants' actual choices. The data was classified according to Ishihara (2010)'s definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, we compared the selections with their linguistic performance using DCTs to determine if they were indicative of resistance to pragmatics. The interviewees were asked to explain their choices of behavior in a particular situation.

The findings of the MQs and DCTs were then examined using descriptive statistics and Z-tests. It was found that the CLKs frequently used euphemistic responses such as "sorry" and "thank you." This is likely due to their lack of familiarity with the target language which resulted in an inadequate knowledge of korea pragmatic norms. The results showed that the CLKs' preferences for either converging to L1 norms or dissociating from both L1 and L2 pragmatic norms varied by 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 revealed that CLKs knew about their pragmatic resistance to each DCT situation. The RIs were conducted one-toone within two days after participants had completed the MQs. The RIs were recorded and transcribing, and then coded by two independent coders. The coding process was an iterative process, in which the coders listened and discussed each transcript. The results of coding are compared with the original RI transcripts to determine whether they accurately portrayed the underlying behavior.

Refusal Interviews (RIs)

The most important question in pragmatic research is: Why do some learners refuse to accept native-speaker norms? Recent research attempted to answer this question with various experimental tools, including DCTs MQs and RIs. The participants consisted of 46 CLKs, 44 CNSs and 45 KNSs from five Korean universities. The participants were asked to complete the DCTs and MQs in their L1 or L2 levels. They were then invited to an RI where they were asked to reflect on and discuss their responses to each DCT situation.

The results showed that CLKs on average, did not follow the pragmatic norms of native speakers in more than 40 percent of their responses. They did this even though they could produce native-like patterns. They were also aware of their pragmatic resistance. They attributed their decisions to learner-internal factors such as their identities, personalities, multilingual identities, and ongoing lives. They also referred to external factors such as relational advantages. For instance, they discussed how their relationships with professors led to an easier performance in relation to the intercultural and linguistic rules of their university.

프라그마틱 슬롯 expressed concern about the social pressures or penalties they could be subject to when their social norms were not followed. They were concerned that their native interlocutors may view them as "foreignersand believe that 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 not the default preference of Korean learners. They may still be useful as a model for official Korean proficiency tests. But it would be prudent for future researchers to revisit their usefulness in particular situations and in various cultural contexts. This will allow them to better understand the impact of different cultural contexts on the classroom behavior and interactions of students in L2. Furthermore, this will help educators create more effective methods for teaching and testing korea pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi, principal advisor at Stratways Group in Seoul, is a geopolitical risk consulting.

Case Studies


The case study method is a method that employs in-depth, participant-centered investigations to investigate a specific topic. It is a method that makes use of multiple data sources to support the findings, including interviews, observations, documents, and artifacts. This kind of investigation can be used to study unique or complex subjects that are difficult for other methods of measuring.

The first step in the case study is to define the subject and the goals of the study. This will allow you to identify which aspects of the topic must be investigated and which ones can be skipped. It is also helpful to study the literature to gain a better knowledge of the subject and place the case in a larger theoretical context.

This case study was built on an open-source platform called the KMMLU Leaderboard [50], and its benchmarks for Koreans, HyperCLOVA X, and LDCC Solar (figure 1 below). The results of the test showed that L2 Korean students were highly vulnerable to native models. They were more likely to choose incorrect answer options that were literal interpretations of the prompts, thereby ignoring the correct pragmatic inference. They also showed a strong tendency to add their own text or "garbage" to their responses. This lowered the quality of their responses.

The participants of this study were L2 Korean students who had achieved level four in 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 to answer questions regarding their WTC/SPCC, as well as comprehension and pragmatic awareness.

The interviewees were given two scenarios, each involving an imaginary interaction with their interactants and asked to choose one of the following strategies to employ when making an inquiry. They were then asked to explain the reasons behind their decision. The majority of the participants attributed their pragmatism to their personalities. TS for instance, claimed that she was difficult to approach and was hesitant to ask about the wellbeing of her colleague when they had a heavy work load, even though she thought native Koreans would.