Pragmatic Development ofDirection-Giving by Learners of Korean as a Foreign Language

Foreign language learners often experience limited input in a status unequal setting where modeling of a language is from a higher speaker to a lower addressee, which places limitations on relevant input for the acquisition of L2 pragmatics. This paper investigates the pragmatic development of direction-giving among 30 learners at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels of Korean as a foreign language. Giving directions is a common conversational exchange in daily life. Communicatively competent learners need to know how to give directions in a target language in accordance with the target norms. Learners should know the structure (e.g., opening, pre-closing, and closing) as well as the content of direction-giving in the target language (e.g., direction-giving types, comprehension checks, and orientation checks) (Scotton & Bernsten, 1983; Pearson & Lee, 1992). Furthermore, learners are required to have the ability to use linguistic devices according to addressee status, and to acquire cultural preference in perspective taking within the direction-giving. That is, learners are required to have sociopragmatic knowledge to use appropriate utterances based on the understanding of social standards, and pragmalinguistic knowledge to produce utterances that convey the speaker’s intended illocutionary force (Thomas, 1983). Given that learners need to pay attention to all the relevant linguistic and pragmatic choices, direction-giving in L2 is a complex task. Direction-giving is not a new task in second language research. It has been used often in studies on task-based language learning (Ellis, 2003). A map task as a real world activity is favored because researchers can observe learners’ interactions. During their interactions, learners negotiate meanings, notice input, and produce linguistic output, which lead to language acquisition. In addition to the studies employing direction-giving as a set of tasks, there have also been some studies analyzing native speakers’ direction-giving as speech behaviors (for English Psathas & Kozloff, 1976; Scotton & Bernsten, 1983; Pearson & Lee, 1992; for German, Klein, 1982; for French, Denis, 1997; and for Korean and Japanese, Strauss, Katayama, & Eun, 2002). However, studies investigating learners’ direction-giving under pragmatic perspectives are rare (c.f. Taylor-Hamilton, 2004). To fill this gap, the current study will explore learners’ L2 Korean direction-giving. Another motivation for this study is derived from a call for ILP (interlanguage pragmatics) studies based on the acquisitional perspective. A large body of research in interlanguage pragmatics has focused on learners’ language use rather than their learning (Kasper & Rose, 2002). Bardovi-Harlig (1999a) has argued that research in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) needs to include developmental issues. Developmental studies of the acquisition of L2 pragmatic competence have found that learners initially rely on lexical items and a few formulaic expressions; in the later stage, learners increase their range of directive types and elaborate their utterances by means of various linguistic devices (FelixBrasdefer, 2007; Barron, 2003, Rose, 2000; Ellis, 1992; Schmidt, 1983). Although a speech act of request has gained significant attention from ILP studies, there has been relatively less attention paid to L2 direction-giving from acquisitionally-focused research.