The act of refusal takes place in everyday lives, but it has been discussed to be a difficult speech act for nonnative speakers. This study seeks to investigate Korean EFL learners’ refusals in extended discourse along with their pragmatic perceptions. Sixteen college students were engaged in oral role-plays with two native English speakers and instructed to refuse the interlocutor’s request. The refusal performances were analyzed using conversation analysis framework with respect to the interlocutors’ different powers and the learners’ proficiency levels. Learners also participated in retrospective verbal reports. Findings depict different verbal and nonverbal features illustrating learners’ sensitivity towards higher status and their different linguistic abilities. Furthermore, their verbal reports revealed that despite their pragmatic awareness, learners were not fully equipped with appropriate L2 pragmatic knowledge.

In eliciting pragmatics data from a particular learner group, selecting an adequate elicitation method is crucial because different populations react differently to different methods. The present study compared the cartoon discourse completion test (DCT) and the written DCT in eliciting requests from Korean high school students. One hundred high school 2nd graders participated in this investigation. The cartoon DCT group and the written DCT group were each asked to write down what they would say in specific situations. The data was analyzed in terms of response length, strategy types of the head act, external modification, politeness marker and vocabulary. The results showed that the cartoon DCT group significantly produced more words than the written DCT group. In terms of strategy types of head acts, the cartoon DCT group was more direct utilizing the highest percentage of Mood derivable and the lowest of Hints. In addition, the cartoon DCT group produced data closer to a spoken discourse in terms of external modification. That is, the categories of Confirmation check, Introducing oneself, and Hesitation, which are features usually shown in the oral interaction, appeared only in the cartoon DCT data. Also, compared to the written DCT, the cartoon DCT yielded a wider range of external modification use. As for the use of the politeness marker, please, the cartoon DCT group produced a higher number of the marker, and showed a pattern for using it under the social factors embedded in the scenarios while the written DCT group did not. The findings imply that the cartoon DCT is more effective to elicit richer and more real conversation-like speech acts from high school students.

The review of previous studies on interlanguage pragmatics reveals that they have been modelled on cross-cultural pragmatics. However, in order for interlanguage pragmatics to contribute in the area of second language acquisition, it should examine how L2 pragmatic competence develops as L2 linguistic competence increases. Therefore, interlanguage pragmatics studies should be modelled on acquisitional pragmatics. As an effort to explore developmental features of pragmatic competence by linguistic proficiency, this study investigated the speech act behaviors of three linguistically distinctive groups. A total of 159 English learners, which consisted of high school 1st and 2nd graders, university freshmen, and university seniors, participated in this study. Their written responses to the 7 situations in the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) were analyzed in terms of response length, vocabulary, request forms, and the use of please. The three groups showed different behavioral patterns in the realization of requests and complaints, utilizing different linguistic strategies to be responsive to the social factors. For future research, expanding learner population to include very low and high level learners, developing a new research tool other than DCT, a more systematic grouping by linguistic proficiency were suggested.