2011, Vol.12, No.4

Modern English Education 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.55

pISSN : 1598-0782 / eISSN : 2586-6141
https://journal.kci.go.kr/meeso

The purpose of this paper was to examine one pragmatic aspect of speech act performance, talkativeness of learner language. To this end, a study was conducted in which data were gathered via discourse completion test, and Korean learners of English and native speakers of English were asked to perform the speech act of requests in various situations. The analysis of data showed that indeed, ESL learners tended to make their requests lengthier by making frequent use of supportive moves of external modification across situations than EFL learners and native speakers.EFL learners realized simple, brief requests due mainly to their limited proficiency of L2. It was also found that native speakers were active in internal modification of their request strategies by using downgraders throughout situations, and thus produced more words inside request strategy than two learner groups. The native speakers’ frequent use of downgraders contributed greatly to an appropriate expression of politeness in each situation while the learners’ under-use of downgraders led them to sound direct and impolite across situations. Based on the results of the study, it was suggested that since learner verbosity weakens the illocutionary force of an act by providing more information than needed, and is seen as one type of pragmatic error, learners should be taught to be sensitive to their talking-much behavior in L2 speech act performance.

This study examines one child’s second language (L2) writing development in social learning contexts over a six-month period from the age of seven years and five months. It describes L2 development during the first months of the child’s schooling and interprets it in terms of a socio-semantic approach to language learning. The study, which adopts a qualitative approach in an interpretivist/constructionist research paradigm, entailed the collection and interpretation of data through multiple sources: observation, interviews, and written texts.The analytical framework for the overall interpretation is provided by systemic functional linguistics. A metafunctional analysis of the child’s written texts shows that, widening social and cultural experience and developing theL2, the child has expanded the meanings she could make with the language in the culture. The analysis also shows that a distinguishing feature of the child’s writing is the use of formulaic expressions. The study argues that from a sociosemantic perspective formulaic expressions are meaningful and worthy of analysis in language and mental development, since they were an important resource for the child’s L2 developmentand mental processes of repeating and memorizing the same forms are thought-stimulating. Therefore, it suggests that language teachers need to teach functionally relevant expressions for situations to early L2 learners.

The present study attempted to re-evaluate the effectiveness of minimal pair drills,based on the concept of markedness or typological markedness, which was adopted by Eckman (1977, 1981a) to account for L2 phonology such as the relative degree of difficulty in L2 acquisition. To this end, the perceptual acquisition of English tense and lax vowels by Korean speakers of English was investigated to see how effective minimal pair drills are in perceiving the differences between similar L2 sounds. The notion of typological markedness made it possible to formulate the three different hypotheses about possible treatments for helping Korean learners identify L2 English tense-lax vowels: minimal pair stimulus, tense vowel (unmarked vowels) stimulus, and lax vowel (marked vowels) stimulus. The results showed that lax vowels were a more useful stimulus rather than the other two stimuli - minimal pair and tense vowels, suggesting that presenting only lax vowels or presenting lax vowels earlier might be a more effective way to improve Korean learners' ability to discriminate English tense-lax vowels than using the minimal pair drills, at least in a context in which Korean learners are taught to identify English tense and lax vowelsat a word-level.