8 Tips To Improve Your Pragmatic Game

Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean

CLKs' awareness and ability to draw on relational affordances, as well as learning-internal factors, were significant. For instance the RIs from TS and ZL both mentioned their relationships with their local professors as a significant factor in their pragmatic choice to avoid criticising a strict professor (see example 2).

This article reviews all local pragmatic research on Korean published until 2020. It focuses on core practical issues, including:

Discourse Construction Tests (DCTs)

The test for discourse completion (DCT) is an instrument that is widely used in research that is based on pragmatic principles. It has many strengths but it also has some disadvantages. The DCT for instance, does not take into account individual and cultural differences. The DCT can also be biased and can lead to overgeneralizations. This is why it must be carefully analyzed before it is used for research or for assessment purposes.

Despite its limitations, the DCT is a valuable tool to investigate the relationship between prosody, information structure and non-native speakers. The ability to alter the social variables that are relevant to politeness in two or more steps can be a plus. This can assist researchers understand the role of prosody in communication across cultural contexts, which is a major issue in cross-cultural pragmatics.

In the field of linguistics DCT is one of the most effective tools to study the behavior of communication learners. It can be used to study various issues, including the manner of speaking, turn-taking and the choices made in lexical use. It can be used to determine the level of phonological sophistication in learners' speech.

A recent study employed a DCT to evaluate EFL students' ability to resist. Participants were presented with a range of scenarios to choose from and then asked to choose the appropriate response. The authors concluded that the DCT was more effective than other refusal measures that included a questionnaire as well as video recordings. However, they cautioned that the DCT should be used with caution and should include other types of data collection methods.

DCTs are typically designed with specific linguistic criteria in mind, such as the content and the form. These criteria are intuitive and based upon the assumptions of test designers. They may not be precise, and they could be misleading about the way ELF learners actually resist requests in real-world interaction.  helpful resources  calls for more research into different methods to assess refusal ability.

A recent study compared DCT responses to requests submitted by students through email with those gathered from an oral DCT. The results showed that DCTs favored more direct and conventionally indirect request forms and used more hints than email data.

Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)

This study investigated Chinese learners' pragmatic choices when it comes to using Korean through a variety of tools that were tested, including Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) as well as metapragmatic questionnaires and Refusal Interviews (RIs). Participants were 46 CLKs of intermediate or higher ability who responded to DCTs and MQs. They were also asked to think about their evaluations and refusal responses in RIs. The results revealed that CLKs frequently chose to resist native Korean pragmatic norms, and that their choices were influenced by four major factors: their identities, their multilingual identities, their ongoing lives, and their relational benefits. These findings have pedagogical implications for L2 Korean assessment and teaching.

The MQ data were analyzed to determine the participants' rational choices. The data were categorized according to Ishihara's (2010) definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, the selections were compared with their linguistic performance on the DCTs to determine if 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 and DCTs were then analyzed using descriptive statistics and z-tests. It was discovered that the CLKs frequently resorted to euphemistic responses such as "sorry" and "thank you." This was likely due to their lack of familiarity with the target language, which led to an insufficient understanding of korea pragmatic norms. The results showed that CLKs' preference to diverge from L1 and 2 norms or to be more convergent toward L1 differed based on the DCT circumstances. For example, in Situation 3 and 12, the CLKs preferred to diverge from both L1 and L2 pragmatic norms whereas in Situation 14, they favored converging to L1 norms.

The RIs revealed that CLKs were aware of their practical resistance to each DCT situation. The RIs were conducted in a one-to-one manner within two days of the participants had completed the MQs. The RIs were recorded and transcribed, and then coded by two coders from different companies. Coding was an iterative process in which the coders discussed and read each transcript. The results of coding are contrasted with the original RI transcripts to determine whether they accurately portrayed the underlying behavior.

Interviews with Refusal

The key issue in research on pragmatics is: why do some learners refuse to accept native-speaker norms? A recent study sought to answer this question employing a variety of research tools, such as DCTs, MQs, and RIs. Participants included 44 CLKs and 46 CNSs from five Korean Universities. They were required to complete the DCTs in their first language and complete the MQs either in their L1 or L2. Then they were invited to attend a RI where they were asked consider 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 so even though they could produce native-like patterns. They were also aware of their pragmatic resistance. They attributed their decisions to learner-internal aspects such as their identities, personalities, multilingual identities, and ongoing life experiences. They also mentioned external factors, such as relational advantages. They described, for example how their relationships with their professors allowed them to function more easily in terms of the cultural and linguistic standards of their university.

However, the interviewees also expressed concern about the social pressures and punishments that they could be subjected to if they strayed from their local social norms. They were concerned that their native interlocutors might perceive them as “foreignersand consider them ignorant. This concern was similar to the concerns voiced by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).

These findings suggest that native speakers' pragmatic norms are not the norm for Korean learners. They may remain useful as a model for official Korean proficiency tests. Future researchers should consider reassessing the applicability of these tests in various cultural contexts and in specific situations. This will allow them to better understand the effect of different cultures on the classroom behavior and interactions of students from L2. Furthermore it will assist educators to create more effective methods for teaching and testing korea pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi is principal advisor to Stratways Group, a geopolitical risk consultancy based out of Seoul.

Case Studies

The case study method is an investigative technique that employs participant-centered, in-depth studies to study a specific subject. This method utilizes numerous sources of information like interviews, observations and documents to support its findings. This type of investigation is useful when analyzing unique or complex subjects that are difficult to measure with other methods.

The first step in a case study is to clearly define the subject matter and the purpose of the study. This will help determine which aspects of the subject matter are essential for research and which could be left out. It is also helpful to review the existing literature to gain a general knowledge of the subject and place the case in a larger theoretical context.

This case study was based on an open source platform, the KMMLU leaderboard [50] and its benchmarks that are specific to Korea, HyperCLOVA X and LDCC-Solar (figure 1 below). The results of this study revealed that L2 Korean learners were particularly vulnerable to the influence of native models. They were more likely to select incorrect answers that were literal interpretations of the prompts, thereby ignoring the correct pragmatic inference. They also had a strong tendency to include their own text, or "garbage," to their responses, further reducing their response quality.

Moreover, the participants of this case study were L2 Korean learners who had reached level 4 on the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) at the end of their third or second year of university, and were aiming to reach level 6 for their next test. They were asked questions about their WTC/SPCC, pragmatic awareness, understanding and understanding of the world.

The interviewees were presented two scenarios, each involving an imagined interaction with their co-workers and were asked to choose one of the following strategies to use when making an inquiry. The interviewees were then asked to justify their choice. Most of the participants attributed their lack of a pragmatic response to their personality. For instance, TS claimed that she was hard to get close to, and therefore was reluctant to inquire about her interactant's well-being with the burden of a job, even though she believed that native Koreans would do this.