This study aims to take a look at the development of a learner's speech capability by analyzing the different speech act strategy for each level depending on the proficiency with Mongolian learners of the Korean language as the subjects. By analyzing ...
This study aims to take a look at the development of a learner's speech capability by analyzing the different speech act strategy for each level depending on the proficiency with Mongolian learners of the Korean language as the subjects. By analyzing the usage of speech act strategy of the learners, the development of speech act capability according to proficiency level was identified from an interlanguage pragmatics perspective.
Thus this study chose the speech act of refusal, which despite the high possibility of usage from basic level to daily usage is difficult to use, to look at how the strategy is used by comparing between the group of learners and Koreans. refusal cannot be used on its own can only appear as a response to the opponent's comment. Thus, by categorizing the speech acts that induces a refusal into four types in request, invitation․provision, proposal and recommendation, this study analyzed the usage of refusal strategy depending on the proficiency in the language. Also since a refusal is an opposing act of the opposition's locutionary act, and the extent of threat that it could make the opponent lose face is huge, thus there is a need to much carefully consider the social variables when rejecting. By categorizing the social variable into friendliness and social status, this study took a look at how differently refusal takes place with depending on the relationship with the person and the proficiency of the speaker.
The research was conducted with a group of Mongolian learners divided into basic, average, and advanced, and 20 people selected for each group, and another 20 Korean native speakers took part to compare the strategy used for refusal, thus a total of 80 people took part. Written DCT was used as the measurement tool, and the contents of the survey were categorized into 24 sections, considering the speech act of inducing and social variables. The collected data was categorized using the strategic framework set up by the researchers with frequency of usage of strategy, number of strategy used, and position when refusal starts analyzed as the three types of most frequent strategy.
The result of the studies are as below.
First, the more proficient the learner is, the learners were more sensitive to the interlocutor's inductive speech act and social variables. Also the more proficient the learner is, the learner used more strategies and rejected longer. However, when it comes to strategy to start the refusal, there was no obvious development aspect.
Second, the overall usage of direct refusal was shown to decrease as the person was more proficient. As the person has more linguistic arsenal at disposal, instead of directly rejecting, they chose a strategy to indirectly reject. Koreans do not prefer direct refusals when rejecting, likewise, as the learners were more advanced, the more often they displayed such trend. Through this, as the learners became more proficient, they became more similar to Koreans.
Third, by using the extent of conclusiveness that the ending of the word and word carries in a 'direct refusal' strategy and 'explanation' strategy often used in a response, this study categorized the strategy into conclusive and inconclusive strategy. Usage of a conclusive strategy was easily obtained at even a low proficiency rate. The usage of inconclusive strategy increased and developed as the proficiency increased. However, even at advanced level the capability could not match a Korean's. Thus proving that the learners failed to learn perfectly.
Fourth, when it comes to the usage of additional strategy to lessen the threat of offending a person through refusal, the leaners could not reach the standard of Koreans in all aspects of proficiency. The higher the level of proficiency, the more various types of additional strategy are used, and while the frequency of usage of individual strategy increased, the basic and average learners used fewer strategies than Koreans, while advanced learners used more strategies than Koreans, showing either underutilization or overutilization. The higher the proficiency of the learners, they developed to be more similar to the usage pattern of Koreans, however even at the advanced level, their way of usage was not identical to Koreans and they either overused or underused.
Former studies on the speech act of refusal compares the usage by a native speaker and a learner, identified that there is a difference between the two groups, and had the tendency to explain the difference by focusing on the transfer of the native language. Also the subject of research was focused on the advanced learners, excluding the beginners and average learners, thus neglecting the fact that the speech act capability of a learner can improve. Thus this study categorized learners with accordance to their frequency and is meaningful that it proved that by looking at the speech act strategy used, the learner's capability changed and developed according to proficiency.