Investigated the connection between Korean children's participation in an interactive book reading program and their development of pragmatic competence in English. Found that participation led to significant changes over a 4-month period in the mean number of words, utterances, and talk management features as measured by the changes in children's…

Discusses how English-as-a-foreign-language textbooks published according to the Korean Ministry of Education standards incorporate speech act behaviors of apology and compliments for Korean middle school learners of English and suggests what can be done to better equip students with pragmatic competence by analyzing 24 textbooks.(Author/VWL)

Focuses on determining the differences between English native speakers and English-as-a-Second-Language Korean learners in the use of politeness strategies under a variety of situations where social and psychological factors are variables. (Author/VWL)

Interviews, questionnaires and tests may fail as evaluations of pragmatic competence in a foreign language because they cannot reproduce contexts in sufficient detail and/or because they cannot constrain discourse options without contaminating the learner response. In this study a cartoon Discourse Completion Test (DCT) prompt was used, providing…

Articles on speech acts and intercultural communication include: "Investigating the Production of Speech Act Sets" (Andrew Cohen); "Non-Native Refusals: A Methodological Perspective" (Noel Houck, Susan M. Gass); "Natural Speech Act Data versus Written Questionnaire Data: How Data Collection Method Affects Speech Act…

The present study examines the influence of social distance and power factors on the use of internal and external mitigating devices and strategies in the production of requests by Korean learners of Russian. The data was collected by using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) containing twelve situations that varied in the facts of power and social…

As global competition has intensified in Higher Education (HE) over the past decade, HE institutions of many non-English-speaking societies have strategically concentrated on internationalisation and increased the international population of their campuses. This case study investigated non-native English-speaking international students' academic…

This article investigates the intercultural competence and identities of undergraduate heritage language learners (HLLs) studying abroad under the auspices of the U.S. Flagship Program. Based on survey responses and interviews with HLLs from Flagship Programs across the country, the article aims to assess the preparation of HLLs for study abroad…

Although significant attention has been devoted to the notion of facework and its functions, facework among L2 speakers, whose cultural backgrounds and language proficiencies vary, has remained unexplored. The present study attempts to explore situations of intercultural communication in which facework is used as a way to remedy moments of…

Much of what is known about the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in second language Spanish is based on studies of English-speaking learners. This body of research has demonstrated common pathways in the acquisition of multiple variable structures, as well as how second language learners come to use (or not) Spanish in linguistically and…

The international use of English as a lingua franca (ELF)--i.e. between non-native speakers of different nationalities, in situations where no native English speakers are present--has become an important feature of business, diplomacy, education, and personal relationships around the world. Nowhere is this more true than in Northeast Asia, where…

A series of studies investigating cultural differences in apology usage in unsolicited email advertising messages (i.e., SPAM) are reported. Study 1 documented that in comparison to American SPAM, a greater percentage of Korean SPAM included apologies. The next five studies ("Ns" = 516, 3132, 662, 524, 536) tested various explanations…

When 32 monolingual Korean and 24 English children were asked to respond "right" or "wrong" on a sentence-picture or sentence-knowledge verification task, members of both groups found true negatives the hardest sentences to verify. When 16 Korean speakers between 4 and 7 years of age were asked to deny statements, they produced…