2012, Vol.13, No.4

Modern English Education 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.55

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

This study aimed to analyze textbook dialogs focusing on the distribution of the interlocutors’ role relationships and pragmatic inappropriateness with respect to interlocutors’ social power, social distance and gender. A total of 15 middle school English textbooks were analyzed. Results showed that with respect to social power, there was over-presentation of the dialogs between interlocutors of equal status, with little attention to the dialogs between persons of unequal status. A similar trend was evident with respect to social distance since there was heavy reliance on the dialogs between interlocutors whose familiarity was neutral, with the minimal presentation of the dialogs between intimates and between strangers. With respect to the gender variable, a majority of textbook dialogs did not include information about interlocutors’ gender. A qualitative analysis yielded various facets of pragmatic inappropriateness. With respect to social power, a speaker’s choice of language was found to be inappropriate sometimes to a younger person, sometimes to an equal and sometimes to an older person. Various aspects of pragmatic inappropriateness were also manifested with respect to social distance, showing mismatch between the familiarity between interlocutors and their choice of language. However, there was only one aspect of pragmatic inappropriateness with respect to gender. On the basis of these results, pedagogical implications are discussed, together with helpful suggestions.

This study compares the results of linguistic errors of Korean EFL college learners’ corpus with two types of error analysis. 86 female college students participated in the study, and wrote a narrative essay through the Criterion®. After their essays were rated by e-rater®, they were divided into three proficiency groups according to writing scores and then linguistic errors were classified, based on Ferris’ (2002) error classification. All linguistic errors were analyzed by two different frames such as conventional analysis (i.e., the number of each error type and its percentage) and T-unit analysis (i.e., the number of each error type was divided by T-unit). Through the comparison of two error analysis, morphological errors were the most frequent, followed by lexical errors across writing proficiency levels. Syntactic errors were the least frequent among these three main types of errors. The same results arose from two different error ratio measures, but error distribution across writing proficiency levels differed. In particular, error ratio measures with T-units yielded more accurate results when analyzing error distribution across writing proficiency levels. The findings suggest that error analysis through this new ratio measure presents more verifiable results than through conventional analysis.

This study investigates the understanding or degree of compliment strategies for college learners of English in different situations. 75 college students who studied Practical English course at a university in Korea responded to the compliment questionnaires of ten items. First, the self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ) displayed students’ perception of compliment responses. The results of the SAQ test showed that female group produced more affirmative and intimate attitude towards the compliment situations than that of male. Second, the discourse completion test (DCT) demonstrated students’ expression on compliment in another ten different situations. In the use of parts of speech, students used verb ‘be’ for more than half ratio (57.7%), adjectives ‘good’ for almost half percent (45.7%), and adverbs ‘very’ for almost half percent (54.1%). Third, the DCT results also indicated the positions of adverb for intensifiers. In the use of stylistic structures, students chose NP be AD ADJ (67.8%) followed by S AD v NP and PRO be AD (a) ADJ NP. Fourth, acceptance (65.9%) was most frequently in the four types of response strategies. The findings will contribute to understanding of styles of compliment and realizing instructions of compliment for college learners of English.