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A Study on teaching speech acts for learners of elementary Korean with a focus on requests, suggestions, acceptance and refusals Yoon, Chang-SookㆍWon, Yun-Hee This study intends to present ideas on how to teach speech acts for learners of elementary Korean focusing on requests, suggestions, acceptance and refusals. These speech acts are taught even from the beginner’s level of Korean language education. Thus it is important to provide pragmatic information of such speech acts so that learners will be able to speak appropriately in relevant circumstances. The study proposes methodology for teachers to use in presenting speech acts of request, suggestion, acceptance and refusal to learners based on an analysis of selected textbooks of elementary Korean and the results of survey conducted on learners of elementary Korean regarding those speech acts. Textbook analysis finds several problems: most sample conversations do not clearly indicate the relations between participants or what kind of circumstances under which the participants are speaking; most sample conversations use “-ayo/uyo” style which can be used between speakers of equal social status with a social distance; sample conversations of refusal are extremely limited so strategies such as mitigation or offers of alternatives when making a refusal are hard to find. Survey results show that learners have difficulty in using correct vocabulary or verb endings as warranted by the social context and relative status of their collocutor even when the learner has correctly assesses those variables. Also, some of the refusals appear to be impolite, lacking mitigation device or offers of alternatives. The proposed teaching ideas include ensuring that learners know the relationship between participants in conversation providing detailed contextual information, presenting useful expressions for both speech of acts of acceptance and refusal, and providing strategies in speech of refusal to help learners avoid impolite speech acts.