With the objective of helping foreigners in their studies of Korean, the purpose of this paper is to look into the way foreigners recognize the differences between literal, non-literal and other ironic meanings.
There is a considerable number of Kore...
With the objective of helping foreigners in their studies of Korean, the purpose of this paper is to look into the way foreigners recognize the differences between literal, non-literal and other ironic meanings.
There is a considerable number of Korean learners within the Korean education system. The target of this study is Japanese native speaker who are learning Korean. Japanese were chosen because the language shares many similar features with Korea language.
Chapter 1 will examine both the necessity and purpose of this study and also look into the progress of previous research about irony and its connection with the current study. There is almost no research about “irony”, that has dealt with pragmatics and rhetoric, which has had mostly foreigners as the subject of the experiment. When it comes to irony, because the sentence meaning and the utterance meaning are different it is necessary to come up with an educated guess based on the context. There are differences between whenforeigner learners use Korean and when they use their own native language and so they often experience difficulties. So by examining how Japanese learners of Korean recognize Korean irony it may be possible to assist learners in those areas that they may have difficulties with. The present paper’s investigation into this research problem looks at Japanese learners of Korean who understand the meaning of irony but the level of compression depends on the form of the question.
In chapter two, before looking into how Japanese learners of Korean recognize the meaning of irony, it is first necessary to define “irony” and its function. Also an outline of the phases of the experiment and background theories will be presented. According to the definition of Hangil(2005, 32), irony is the “difference in the relationship between the literal meaning and the non-literal meaning, either being an opposite relationship or a contradictory relationship and the meaning is intensified when it is included into the rule structure of the sentence”. The function of irony to emphasize, ridicule, to be sarcastic, to save face and to be humorous has been analyzed. Following the classification standard of Hangil(2005), the form in which irony appears has been rearranged as the following: syntactical factors, phonetic factors, phoneme + syntactical factors, and vocabulary + syntactical factors. This rearrangement was made with reference to Korean language learning resources for foreigners and Korean grammars for foreigners. All this was done with the aim of trying to be used in the education of Korean.
In chapter three a description of the research method is covered and deals with issues such as the research subjects, research tools, research method and the data analysis method. The research subjects consisted of 60 Japanese, with 30 people with an intermediate level of Korean and another 30 who were advanced level students. These were compared with 30 native Korean speakers. In addition the ironic expressions that were classified in chapter two, appear as one part of the experimental research. The results were analyzed using variance analysis (ANOVA) and the t-test and were recorded as to frequency analysis.
Chapter 4 deals with the questionnaire that was filled out by Japanese learners of Korean and they were asked questions related to ironic meanings and an account was taken of the results of the survey. The first problem of the research was when the subjects understood the meaning of the irony to try and determine differences in proficiency. The only problem was reflected in the use of the important effect of syntax and this made a meaningful difference to the level of understanding between intermediate and advanced learners. The second problem of the research was when the subjects understood the meaning of the irony and it needed to be determined whether this depended on the form of the question. When comparing the differences between the factors of the different ways in which irony appears, amongst the factors a difference was noted. Irony that appears from syntactical factors was the easiest to understand and irony that appears from phonetic factors was the most difficult to recognize. The possible combinations are Phoneme + syntactical factors, vocabulary + syntactical factors and any one of these combinations made it easier to understand the meaning better them simply considering just the phonetic factors. However compared with just considering the syntactical meaning alone it was more difficult for students to understand the ironic meaning using phonetic factors.
In chapter five the question of how the education of Korean should deal with irony is examined. In order to try and think how Korean learners can more easily understand irony, how irony should appear in learning resources needs to be examined and after that how that could be best reflected in such resources. In Korean learning resources ‘-지 않아요?’, ‘가 아니에요?’ forms of ironic syntax are the most common and after that the interrogative, the pronoun, adverb etc. and they frequently appear together with vocabulary + syntax. However even though learners found phonetic factors to be the most difficult there were no learning resources to explain it clearly and furthermore there were also no resources that clearly explain the meaning of irony. In order for learners to better understand irony, a greater variety of examples needs to be used in a way that helps elucidate the meaning.
Lastly in chapter six, a synthesis of the research results will be given and a description of the significance of this thesis and the limitation of the study. The first significant result comes from examining the opinions given by the learners through the experiment and the interview. Secondly, what needs to be given careful attention to is to how irony should be taught and also what teachers think about the issue. Since there was a limit, so that only Japanese learners of Korean were examined, it was not possible to examine the case of those who had different languages. There was a limit so that only one part(9 forms) of the possible forms in which irony could appear was examined. In order to supplement this research on irony various different types of research need to be pursued.