Why Pragmatic Is Right For You

Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean
In addition to the learner-internal aspects, CLKs' awareness of the need to be pragmatic and the relationship advantages they were able to draw from were crucial. For instance the RIs from TS and ZL both cited their local professor relationships as a major factor in their decision to not criticize an uncompromising professor (see the example 2).
This article reviews all local practical research on Korean until 2020. It focuses on key practical issues, including:
Discourse Construction Tests
The discourse completion test (DCT) is widely used in the field of pragmatic research. It has many advantages, but also a few disadvantages. The DCT for instance, does not take into account individual and cultural variations. The DCT can also be biased and can lead to overgeneralizations. It should be carefully analyzed before being used for research or evaluation.
Despite its limitations, the DCT can be a useful tool to study the relationship between prosody and information structure in non-native speakers. Its ability in two or more stages to influence social variables that affect politeness can be a strength. This feature can be used to study the role of prosody in different cultural contexts.
In the field of linguistics, the DCT has become one of the most important instruments for analyzing learners' behavior in communication. It can be used to study various issues, including the manner of speaking, turn-taking and the use of lexical terms. It can be used to evaluate the phonological complexity of the learners speaking.
A recent study employed an DCT to test EFL students' refusal skills. Participants were presented with various scenarios and were asked to choose the appropriate response from the choices provided. The authors discovered that the DCT to be more effective than other methods for refusing, such as videos or questionnaires. However, the researchers cautioned that the DCT should be employed with caution and include other data collection methods.
DCTs can be developed using specific linguistic criteria, such as the form and content. These criteria are based on intuition and based on the assumptions of test designers. They aren't always exact and could be misleading in describing how ELF learners actually reject requests in real-world interactions. This issue calls for more study on alternative methods for testing refusal competence.
pragmatickr compared DCT responses to requests submitted by students through email with those gathered from an oral DCT. The results showed that DCTs preferred more direct and conventionally indirect request forms and utilized more hints than email data.
Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)
This study explored Chinese learners' decisions regarding their use of Korean by using a range 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 for reflections on their assessments and their refusals to participate in RIs. The results showed that CLKs often resisted native Korean pragmatic norms, and that their choices were influenced by four primary factors that included their identities, their multilingual identities, ongoing lives, and their relational benefits. These findings have pedagogical implications for L2 Korean assessment.
First, the MQ data were examined to identify the participants' pragmatic choices. The data was categorized according Ishihara (2010)'s 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. The interviewees also had to explain why they chose a pragmatic 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 used phrases like "sorry" and "thank you." This is likely due to their lack of familiarity with the target language which led to an insufficient knowledge of korea pragmatic norms. The results revealed that CLKs' preference to differ from L1 and L2 norms or to converge toward L1 differed based on the DCT situations. In the scenarios 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 also revealed the CLKs were aware their own pragmatism in each DCT situation. The RIs were conducted on a one-to-one basis within two days of participants completing the MQs. The RIs were recorded and transcribed by two coders who were independent and then coded. The coders worked in an iterative manner, with the coders re-reading and discussing each transcript. The results of the coding process are contrasted with the original RI transcripts to determine how well they captured the underlying pragmatic behavior.
Interviews with Refusal
A key question of pragmatic research is why learners are hesitant to adhere to native-speaker pragmatic norms. Recent research has attempted to answer this question by using various experimental tools, including DCTs MQs and RIs. The participants comprised 46 CLKs, 44 CNSs and 45 KNSs from five Korean universities. They were required to complete the DCTs in their first language and complete the MQs either in 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 on average, the CLKs resisted the pragmatic norms of native speakers in more than 40% of their answers. They did this despite the fact that they could produce native-like patterns. They were also aware of their pragmatism resistance. They attributed their resistance to learner-internal factors such as their personality and multilingual identities. They also mentioned external factors such as relational advantages. They outlined, for instance, how their interactions with their professors helped them to perform better in terms of the linguistic and cultural expectations of their university.
However, the interviewees expressed concerns about the social pressures and penalties that they might face if they flouted their social norms. They were worried that their native interactants might consider them "foreigners" and believe that they are not intelligent. This is similar to the one expressed by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).
These results suggest that native-speaker practical norms are no longer the preferred choice of Korean learners. They may still be useful for official Korean proficiency testing. But it would be prudent for future researchers to reassess their relevance in specific scenarios and in different cultural contexts. This will help them better comprehend how different environments could affect the practical behavior of students in the classroom and beyond. This will also assist educators to improve their methods of teaching and testing Korean pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi is principal advisor for Stratways Group, a geopolitical risk consultancy based out of Seoul.
Case Studies
The case study method is a method that employs deep, participatory investigations to explore a particular subject. This method makes use of various sources of data, such as interviews, observations and documents to support its findings. This kind of research can be used to study complicated or unique issues that are difficult to other methods to assess.
The first step in the case study is to define the subject and the objectives of the study. This will help you determine which aspects of the topic are important to investigate and which ones can be skipped. It is also helpful to review existing literature related to the subject to gain a broad understanding of the subject and to place the case study within a larger theoretical context.
This case study was built 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 the test showed that L2 Korean students were particularly vulnerable to native models. They were more likely to pick incorrect answer options that were literal interpretations. This was a deviance from a precise pragmatic inference. They also exhibited a strong tendency to include their own text, or "garbage," to their responses, further detracting from the quality of their responses.
The participants of this study were all L2 Korean students who had reached the level of four in the Test of Proficiency in Korean TOPIK in their second or third university year and were aiming to achieve level six on their next attempt. They were asked questions regarding their WTC/SPCC, pragmatic awareness, understanding and understanding of the world.
The interviewees were presented two scenarios, each of which involved a hypothetical interaction with their interlocutors and were asked to select one of the following strategies to employ when making a request. They were then asked to provide the reasoning behind their choice. Most participants attributed their pragmatic opposition to their personalities. For instance, TS claimed that she was hard to get close to, and she therefore did not want to inquire about her interactant's well-being with the burden of a job despite her belief that native Koreans would do so.