earticle

영어

Although there has been much research on L2 speech acts, it is still not clear whether the difference in the degree of directness of requests between L2 learners and native speakers should be interpreted from the universal perspective or the language-specific perspective. This study investigates pragmatic competence of Korean EFL learners in terms of linguistic politeness in requests compared to native speakers of English and Korean. A Discourse Completion Task, which consisted of 12 requesting situations and other 8 distracters, was designed and given to 20 Korean EFL learners as a participant group, and 20 native speakers of English and 20 native speakers of Korean as control groups, to elicit the request forms which the participants were likely to use inreal situations. It was assumed that the universal perspective would be supported ifthe Korean EFL learners express linguistic politeness of requests in a similar way the native English speakers do, while the language-specific perspective would be supported for the opposite situation.