This dissertation aims to study the ways in which Thai Korean major and minor students in Thai universities with a command of intermediate Korean proficiency, perform speech acts of compliment. It focuses on a comparative study of cross cultural pragm...
This dissertation aims to study the ways in which Thai Korean major and minor students in Thai universities with a command of intermediate Korean proficiency, perform speech acts of compliment. It focuses on a comparative study of cross cultural pragmatics concerning the speech acts of compliment, performed by groups of native Koreans, Korean – illiterate Thais, Thai students who learn Korean in Thailand. In order to achieve the objectives of the dissertation, I follow three approaches in each step of the research process, namely, interviewing, questionnairing and the Oral DCT(Discourse Completion Test).
The dissertation is elaborated below:
Chapter I states the objectives and the raison d'être, as well as review the predecessor literature related to the topic in question. The literature review demonstrates that most of the research s in Western countries revolve around the study of the speech acts of compliment performed by Western people in comparison with those performed by the persons who learn English as a second language. Most of the research s conducted in South Korea focus on the study of the same performed by the Koreans in comparison with those performed by the Americans. In Thailand and South Korea, the research s on the speech acts of the same type performed by the Thais who learn Korean have been so far absent.
Chapter II studies the theories related to the subject matter of this dissertation. It is divided into two parts. The first one studies meanings or definitions of the term “compliment”, its special features, its syntactic structures and its frequent subject matters. The second examines theories concerning cross cultural pragmatics, studying pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics failures, which may account for Thai students of the Korean language’s pragmatics failure.
Chapter III examines the three research questions: (1) Are Thais’ and Koreans’ ways of performing speech acts of compliment the same or different and how? (2) How social factors such as gender, intimacy, and the social differences between the speakers and the listeners, influence the ways Thai students of Korean perform this type of speech acts? (3) Do Thai students of Korean encounter any pragmatic failure and how? In addition, there was an examination of the possible causes of this failure.
In this chapter, I also determine the research methods, the research tools, the data collection methods and the data assessment methods so that they could help answer the three research questions mentioned above. The whole research process runs as follows:
First, I interview a group of 30 Korean students and a group of 30 Korean illiterate Thai students (the total number of the students interviewed is hence 60) so as to get the authentic data regarding the situations where compliments are uttered. The data enable me to determine who give compliments, when these compliments are given, and what the compliments in each situation are. The data collection completed, I compare these situations and then select only 36 of them that are common in both groups. In each of these selected situations, the social variables that are capable of influencing the ways speech acts of compliment are performed in the groups, namely, genders (male and female), intimacy levels (intimate and distant), and social status (higher, equal, lower), are assigned.
In order to check whether all of these situations are credible and appropriate for complimenting, I design and then hand out the questionnaires to a group of 50 Korean students and a group of 50 Korean illiterate Thai students (numbering 100 students in total). Then, I select among these situations only 24 that have the average result of more than 3.5.
I also divide the people into three groups: (1) Korean students (2) Thai students (3) Thai students who learn Korean. There are twenty students in each group, hence numbering 60 in total. All the people in these groups are to undergo the Oral DCT (The Oral Discourse Completion Test) and I record the test results of each person in order to transcribe and then analyze them later.
Chapter IV presents the research result. In this chapter, I classify the findings according to the research questions, which they appear to answer, as well as comment on the results of the data analysis. The findings that are categorized under each research question are summarized below:
The analysis of the first research question reveals that both the Koreans and the Thais use the direct complimenting syntactic forms, rather than use their indirect counterpart. Although both of these two peoples use a variety of complimenting sentences, most of their syntactic forms correspond to the findings of the research conducted by Manes & Wolfson (1981), Intachackra (2001) and Kim (2003), when omitting indirect complimenting sentences and then analyzing only the direct ones. This very finding shows very frequent uses of “NP {is/loos} (INT) ADJ” and also reveals that both groups of people most often use the adjectives as part of their compliments to the others. The Koreans often use the words “beautiful”, “good” and “competent” in their compliments while the Thais often use the words “competent”, “beautiful” and “handsome”.
The analysis of the second research question demonstrates that genders determine Thai students of Korean’s forms of compliment: both of the male and the female Thai students express their emotions and feelings straightforwardly in the same way as their male and female Korean counterpart do. Intimacy level also affects the ways the Thai students compliment; namely, the increasing intimacy between the persons who compliment and those who are complimented, causes the former to express their emotions and feelings more and more straightforwardly. On the contrary, when the intimacy diminishes, the Thai students choose to “thank” and “reciprocate” only briefly. This is consistent with Wolfson’s “the Bulge” theory. The social statuses of the persons who compliment and the complimented determine the ways the Thai students perform speech acts of compliment as well. The wider the gap between the two persons’ social statuses is, the more formal and the briefer the Thai students’ speech acts of compliment are. Conversely, when this gap is not so wide and the persons complimented have lower social status than those who compliment, the Thai students tend to use various forms of speech acts of compliment and perform this type of speech acts more naturally.
The analysis of the third research question reveals that the pragmatics failure most often found among the Thai students of Korean is, first, speech level choice failure and, second, appellation choice failure, which fall under the category of pragmalinguistics failure. Considering these two types of pragmatics failure demonstrates that the Thai students still adhere to Thai forms of speech acts of compliment steadfastly and this badly affects the ways they use this type of speech act in Korean. Therefore, it is from their own sociopragmatics failure, it is inferable, that the Thai students’ pragmatics failure originates.
Chapter V is the brief summation of the results of this research and points out its limitations and gives useful advices for further studies on speech acts of compliment.
The findings of this dissertation reveal that many Thai students of Korean are encountering problems concerning the use of Korean speech acts of compliment. There are many factors responsible for these problems: (1) Thai students do not have many chances to talk with the native speakers (2) the curriculum of Korean education in Thailand overlook the importance of pragmatics (3) most teachers put more emphasis on teaching grammar and translation than on communicative language teaching (CLT).
In the present age of communication, apart from having the ability to read and write foreign languages very well, second language learners have to acquire the knowledge of pragmatics appropriate to the situations they are in and the interlocutors they are with, in order to prevent misunderstandings. Therefore, Korean education in Thailand should also emphasize speech acts and cross-cultural pragmatics alongside the development of the learners’ four basic skills.
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