Pragma-Linguistic Differences in Korean EFL Student Productions of Conventional Expressions

Abstract

Conventional expressions are considered an important area of study informing L2 pragmatics and inter-language pragmatics. This study investigates the differences between native English speakers’ and Korean EFL speakers’ productions of conventional expressions by employing an audio-visual production task (adapted from Bardovi-Harlig, 2009). Results show that EFL students statistically differ from their native speaker counterparts in about half of the scenarios involving the production of conventional expressions. While EFL learner productions were often grammatical and appropriate, they also displayed pragma-linguistically infelicitous utterances (e.g., I’m just looking out.) and more verbosity compared to their NS counterparts. Certain scenes including giving and deflecting thanks delivered less target-like expressions, which may lead to communicative failure in real time interaction. Pedagogical implications of this type of study are also discussed.