Study of Chinese Learners' Pedagogical Choices in Korean

CLKs' awareness and ability to make use of relational affordances as well as the learner-internal aspects, were crucial. RIs from TS & ZL for instance were able to cite their relationship with their local professor as the primary reason for their decision to stay clear of criticism of a strict professor (see example 2).

This article reviews all local published practical research on Korean up to 2020. It focuses on the most important practical issues, including:

Discourse Construction Tests (DCTs)

The discourse completion test (DCT) is widely used in pragmatic research. It has numerous advantages, but also some disadvantages. For example, the DCT cannot take into account cultural and individual variations in communication. Additionally, the DCT can be biased and could cause overgeneralizations. As a result, it is important to analyze it carefully before using it for research or assessment purposes.

Despite its limitations, the DCT can be a useful instrument to study the relationship between prosody and information structure in non-native speakers. Its ability in two or more stages to influence the social variables that are related to politeness could be a benefit. This feature can be used to study the impact of prosody across cultural contexts.

In the field linguistics, DCT is one of the most useful tools to analyze the communication habits of learners. It can be used to investigate various aspects such as politeness, turn taking, and lexical selection. It can be used to evaluate the phonological difficulty of learners' speech.

Recent research has used a DCT as a tool to assess the ability to resist of EFL students. Participants were presented with a list of scenarios and were required to choose a suitable response from the options 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, the researchers warned that the DCT should be used with caution and include other data collection methods.

DCTs are typically designed with specific linguistic criteria in mind, like the content and the form. These criteria are intuitive and are based on the assumptions of the test developers. They may not be accurate and may misrepresent how ELF learners actually respond to requests in real-world interactions. This issue requires more research into different methods to assess refusal competence.

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

Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MQs)

This study examined Chinese learners their pragmatic choices when they use Korean. It employed various tools for experimentation including Discourse Completion Tasks, metapragmatic questions and Refusal Interviews. Participants were 46 CLKs of upper-intermediate level who responded to MQs, DCTs, and RIs. They were also asked to reflect on their evaluation and refusal responses in RIs. The results revealed that CLKs frequently chose to resist native Korean pragmatic norms. Their decisions were influenced primarily by four factors that included their personalities and multilingual identities, their current life histories and their relationship affordances. These findings have implications for L2 Korean assessment and teaching.

The MQ data was analyzed in order to identify the participants' practical choices. The data was classified according to Ishihara (2010)'s definition of pragmatic resistance. Then, the choices were compared with their linguistic performance on the DCTs to determine whether they were a reflection of pragmatic resistance or not. In addition, the interviewees were asked to justify their choice of pragmatic behavior in a given scenario.


The results of the MQs, DCTs and z-tests were analyzed with descriptive statistics and Z tests. It was found that CLKs frequently used the use of euphemistic phrases such as "sorry" and "thank you." This is likely due to their lack of experience with the target language which led to an insufficient knowledge of korea pragmatic norms. The results showed that the CLKs' preferences for converging to L1 or diverging from both L1 and L2 pragmatic norms differed based on the DCT situations. In the scenarios 3 and 12 CLKs preferred diverging from both L1pragmatic norms - and L2-pragmatic norms while in Situation 14, CLKs preferred convergence to L1 norms.

The RIs showed that CLKs were aware of their logical resistance to every DCT situation. The RIs were conducted one-to-one within two days after the participants had completed the MQs. The RIs were recorded and transcribed, then coded by two independent coders. The coding process was iterative, with the coders re-reading and discussing each transcript. The results of the coding process are evaluated against the original RI transcripts to determine how well they reflected the actual behavior.

Refusal Interviews (RIs)

The most important issue in research on pragmatics is: Why do some learners choose not to accept native-speaker norms? A recent study attempted to answer this question by employing a variety of research instruments, including DCTs, MQs, and RIs. Participants included 46 CLKs and 44 CNSs from five Korean Universities. The participants were asked to complete the DCTs and MQs in their L1 or L2 levels. Then, they were invited to attend a RI where they were required to think about their responses to the DCT situations.

The results showed that on average, the CLKs resisted native-speaker pragmatic norms in over 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 choice to learner-internal factors like their personalities and multilingual identities. They also spoke of 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 punishments that they might be subjected to if they strayed from the local social norms. They were worried that their native friends might perceive them as “foreigners” and think they were incompetent. This concern was similar in nature to the one expressed by Brown (2013) and Ishihara (2009).

These results suggest that native-speaker practical norms are no longer the norm for Korean learners. They may still be useful as a model for official Korean proficiency tests. Future researchers should reconsider the validity of these tests in various cultural contexts and in specific situations. This will help them better understand the impact of different cultural contexts on the classroom behavior and interactions of students from L2. This will also assist educators to develop better methods for teaching and testing Korean pragmatics. Seukhoon Paul Choi is principal advisor for Stratways Group, a geopolitical risk consulting firm based in Seoul.

Case Studies

The case study method is a strategy that utilizes deep, participatory investigations to study a specific subject. This method utilizes numerous sources of information including interviews, observations and documents, to prove its findings. This kind of research can be used to analyze specific or complicated issues that are difficult to other methods to measure.

The first step in conducting a case study is to clearly define the subject and the objectives of the study. This will allow you to determine what aspects of the subject should be studied and which ones can be skipped. It is also beneficial to read the literature to gain a better knowledge of the subject and place the case in a wider theoretical context.

This study was based on an open-source platform, the KMMLU Leaderboard [50] along with its Korean-specific benchmarks HyperCLOVA X, and LDCC Solar (figure 1 below). helpful resources of the study showed that L2 Korean learners were extremely susceptible to the influence of native models. They were more likely to select incorrect answers which were literal interpretations. This was a deviation from accurate pragmatic inference. They also exhibited an inclination to include their own text, or "garbage," to their responses, further reducing 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 reach level six by their next attempt. They were asked questions regarding their WTC/SPCC, pragmatic awareness, understanding and their knowledge of the world.

Interviewees were presented with two hypothetical situations involving an interaction with their co-workers and asked to choose one of the strategies below to employ when making a demand. Interviewees were then asked to justify their choice. Most of the participants attributed their pragmatism to their personalities. For instance, TS claimed that she was difficult to talk to, and therefore was reluctant to inquire about her interactant's well-being with a heavy workload, even though she believed that native Koreans would do this.