Dissertation

Relationship of onset age of ESL acquisition and extent of informal input to appropriateness and nativeness in performing four speech acts in English: A study of native Korean adult speakers of ESL

Kim, In-Ok

2000

Overview

The growing interest in interlanguage pragmatics reflects the rapid growth in the theoretical and empirical study of pragmatics over the last two decades. Research has shown that grammatical development does not guarantee a corresponding level of pragmatic development. Even advanced language learners often show a marked imbalance between their grammatical and their pragmatic knowledge with pragmatic competence lagging behind grammatical knowledge. This study investigated the effect of both onset age and informal input on Korean adult ESL learner's evolving pragmatic system shown in performing four speech acts, two requests and two apologies. In addition, this study investigated whether learners' level of acculturation to the target language culture was relevant to the input that learners received and associated with their willingness to act in a target culture way. The participants were fifty Korean adult learners of English who came to the U.S. at different ages. Each participant was asked to complete written dialogue tasks and a background questionnaire. Eight out of fifty participants also performed oral role-plays based on the same prompts, which provided data on oral proficiency. Baseline data from twenty-six native speakers of American English allowed the interlanguage data to be compared with target-language utterances elicited in similar circumstances. Two native judges rated participants' performance according to a four-point nativeness rating scale. The performance was also analyzed qualitatively based on the analytical framework of a request and apology-coding scheme. The analyses demonstrated that early onset age, greater informal input, and closer cultural orientation to the target culture had positive effects on learners' pragmatic competence. Also, regression analysis revealed that while each variable did not operate independently as predictor of pragmatic attainment, the variables appeared to behave synergistically in determining learners' level of interlanguage pragmatic competence. In other words, age of arrival, amount of informal input and cultural orientation together contribute significantly to the explanation of the outcome. Based on the findings, I suggest the need to incorporate consciousness-raising activities in the introduction of pragmatics, acknowledging the importance of instruction in the development of pragmatics in L2 discourse fluency.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Bilingual education / Language arts / Multicultural Education
• ISBN: 9780599730960, 059973096X