Resumen de Developing KFL Students’ Pragmatic Awareness of Korean Speech Acts: The Use of Discourse Completion Tasks

Andrew Sangpil Byon

• Teaching pragmatic competence in Korean-as-a-foreign language (KFL) settings is still an underdeveloped area, when compared to teaching other language areas, such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The first step to enhance pragmatic language teaching in foreign language (FL) education is to raise the FL instructors’ and students’ pragmatic awareness (Kasper & Rose, 2001). This paper investigates a case of raising pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic awareness of Korean speech acts to intermediate KFL students in an American university, using a discourse completion task (DCT). This study discusses how the DCT approach, as a pragmatic-consciousness-raising (PCR) technique, can assist FL instructors in developing pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic awareness of the target speech acts. The study shows that DCT provided a very practical tool for our students to recognise the pragmatic features. Conducting a survey with L1 and L2 speakers made the learning process more engaging, relevant, and interesting for most students. Although the discussion and procedures presented in this paper are from an American college-level intermediate KFL course, the cases presented may be adapted for use in any foreign language course that has struggled with teaching L2 pragmatic competence.