Sang-Seok Yoon. 2011. Cross-sectional Analysis of KFL Students’ Requests and Refusals. Language Information . Volume 12. 223-248.
This study investigates the pragmatic competence and development of learners of Korean as a foreign language (KFL) by examining their performance of the speech acts of request and refusal. It explores the developmental patterns and situational variation for the two speech acts―request and refusal―and also explores the possibility of teaching pragmatics successfully in a KFL setting. Data related to the request and refusal speech acts were collected through Cartoon Discourse Completion Tasks (CDCT). Ten beginner-level and ten intermediate-level students of Korean courses at a university in the United States participated in this study. Nine Korean native speakers (KNS) also participated in the study.
The results show that although there was a little development in the intermediate-level KFL students, the students were more focused on the semantic meaning, without clearly understanding the pragmatic function of various Korean expressions. This study suggests that students should practice Korean while imagining various social situations, and they should be explicitly taught how to act appropriately in various common speech act situations.(University of Minnesota)
Key words: speech acts, request, refusal, pragmatics, pragmatic development, DCT, Korean as a foreign language(KFL)