Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean
In addition to the learner-internal aspects CLKs' understanding of their own resistance to change and the social ties they were able to draw from were important. For instance the RIs from TS and ZL both have cited their relationships with their local professors as a significant reason for them to choose to avoid expressing criticism of the strictness of a professor (see the second example).
This article reviews all locally published practical research on Korean up to 2020. It focuses on key practical issues, including:
Discourse Construction Tests
The test for discourse completion is a commonly used tool in the field of pragmatic research. It has many advantages, but it also has some disadvantages. The DCT is one example. It is unable to account for cultural and individual variations. The DCT can also be biased and can lead to overgeneralizations. This is why it should be analyzed carefully before using it for research or for assessment purposes.
Despite its limitations the DCT is a valuable instrument to study the connection between prosody, information structure, and non-native speakers. Its ability to use two or more stages to alter the social variables that are related to politeness could be a benefit. This feature can be used to study the role of prosody across cultural contexts.
In the field of linguistics, the DCT has become one of the most significant tools for analyzing learners' behavior in communication. It can be used to investigate various aspects that include politeness, turn taking, and lexical selection. It can be used to evaluate phonological complexity in learners speaking.
A recent study utilized an DCT to evaluate EFL students' refusal skills. Participants were given various scenarios and asked to choose the appropriate response from the options provided. The researchers found the DCT to be more efficient than other methods of refusal, such as a questionnaire or video recordings. However, they cautioned that the DCT should be employed with caution and include other types of data collection methods.
DCTs are usually created with specific linguistic requirements in mind, like content and form. These criteria are based on intuition and is based on the assumptions made by the test developers. They aren't always correct, and they could be misleading about the way ELF learners actually resist requests in real-world interaction. This issue requires more research on alternative methods of assessing refusal competency.
In a recent research study, DCT responses to student inquiries via email were compared to the responses from an oral DCT. The results revealed that DCT was more direct and traditionally form-based requests and made a less frequent use of hints than email data did.
Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)
This study looked at Chinese learners their pragmatic choices when they use Korean. It used a variety of experimental tools including Discourse Completion Tasks, metapragmatic questions, and Refusal Interviews. Participants were 46 CLKs with upper-intermediate ability who provided responses to DCTs and MQs. They were also asked to reflect on their evaluation and refusal performances in RIs. The results showed that CLKs frequently chose to resist native Korean pragmatic norms. Their choices were influenced by four factors such as their personality and multilingual identities, their current lives, as well as their relationships. These findings have implications for pedagogy for L2 Korean assessment and teaching.
The MQ data was first analyzed to identify the participants' actual choices. The data were classified according to Ishihara (2010)'s definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, we compared their choices with their linguistic performance using DCTs in order to determine if they were indicative of a pragmatic resistance. Additionally, the participants were asked to justify their decision to use pragmatic language in a given situation.
The results of the MQs, DCTs and z-tests were examined using descriptive statistics and z tests. It was found that the CLKs often resorted to phrases like "sorry" and "thank you." This is likely due to their lack of experience 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 2 norms or to be more convergent toward L1 differed based on the DCT circumstances. For instance, in Situations 3 and 12 the CLKs would prefer to diverge from both L1 and L2 pragmatic norms while in Situation 14, they favored converging to L1 norms.
The RIs further revealed that the CLKs were aware their own pragmatism in each DCT situation. RIs were conducted on a one-to-one basis within a period of two days of the participants completing the MQs. The RIs were transcribed and recorded by two independent coders, were then coded. The code was re-coded repeatedly and involved the coders reading and discussing each transcript. The results of coding were compared to the original RI transcripts, which gave an indication of how well the RIs captured the underlying pragmatic behavior.
Refusal Interviews (RIs)
The most important issue in research on pragmatics is: why do some learners decide to not accept native-speaker norms? Recent research sought to answer this question using various experiments, including DCTs MQs and RIs. The participants were comprised of 46 CLKs, 44 CNSs and 45 KNSs from five Korean universities. They were asked to perform the DCTs in their native language and to complete the MQs in either their L1 or their 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 adhere to the pragmatic 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 pragmatism resistance. They attributed their choices to learner-internal factors like their identities, personalities and identities that are multilingual, as well as ongoing life histories. They also referred to external factors, like relationship advantages. They also discussed, for instance, how their relationships with their professors allowed them to perform better in terms of the linguistic and cultural standards of their university.
However, the interviewees expressed concerns about the social pressures and consequences that they might face if they flouted their local social norms. They were worried that their native friends may view them as "foreignersand believe that they are unintelligent. This concern was similar in nature to that expressed by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).
These findings suggest that native-speakers' pragmatic norms are not the norm for Korean learners. They could remain useful as a model for official Korean proficiency tests. Future researchers should reconsider the validity of these tests in different contexts and in particular situations. This will allow them to better understand the effect of different cultural environments on the behavior of students and classroom interactions of students from L2. Moreover, this will help educators develop more effective methodologies for teaching and testing the korea-based pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi is principal advisor at Stratways Group, a geopolitical risk consultancy based out of Seoul.
Case Studies
The case study method is a research strategy that utilizes intensive, participant-centered research to explore a particular subject. It is a method that utilizes various sources of information to help support the findings, such as interviews and observations, documents, and artifacts. This kind of research is ideal for studying complicated or unique subjects that are difficult to quantify using other methods.
The first step in a case study is to define the subject and the objectives of the study. This will help determine which aspects of the subject matter are crucial for research and which could be left out. It is also beneficial to read the literature to gain a better knowledge of the subject and put the issue within a larger theoretical framework.
This 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). simply click the next document of the study showed that L2 Korean students were particularly susceptible to native models. They were more likely to select incorrect answer options that were literal interpretations of the prompts, thereby ignoring accurate pragmatic inference. They also had a strong tendency to include their own words or "garbage" to their responses. This lowered the quality of their responses.
Moreover, the participants of this case study were L2 Korean learners who had attained level 4 in 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 to answer questions regarding their WTC/SPCC, as well as pragmatic awareness and comprehension.
The interviewees were presented two scenarios, each involving an imagined interaction with their interlocutors and were asked to choose one of the following strategies when making a request. They were then asked to provide the reasoning behind their choice. The majority of participants attributed their pragmatism to their personalities. TS, for example stated that she was difficult to get along with and was hesitant to inquire about the health of her co-worker when they had a lot of work, even though she believed native Koreans would.