Disagreement for Politeness in Speech Act of Korean EFL Learners

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the speech act by a group of Korean EFL students at university level. In order to determine why and to what extent the production of speech act of disagreement and the patterns of politeness strategies by Korean EFL learners, in university setting, across different proficiency levels (intermediate and lower) a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was completed by 20 Korean EFL learners who were placed at two different levels based on their scores on a TOEIC test. The DCT consists of five situations in which the subjects are expected to disagree. The selection of disagreement situations in DCT was borrowed from studies by Takahashi and Beebe (1993). The taxonomy from Muntigl and Turnbull (1998) was employed for counting and analyzing the utterances of disagreement from the responses. Results show that the lower proficiency of Korean EFL learners employ more direct way of disagreement than their immediate level of Korean EFL learners. The findings of this study provide some evidences for the relation between the learners’ level of language proficiency and frequency of disagreement.