Teaching ‘casual’ and/or ‘impolite’ language through multimedia: the case of non-honorific panmal speech styles in Korean

Abstract

This article reports on the design, implementation and evaluation of an activity used to teach non-honorific speech styles through multimedia to a class of intermediate learners at a university in Europe. Although much emphasis has been placed in Korean language learning and teaching on the importance of honorific styles, my article reveals that this at times has come at the expense of ignoring the other side of the coin: non-honorific language. Indeed, Korean language teaching materials delay the teaching of non-honorific language to intermediate level and then only deal with them in a perfunctory way. This is unfortunate as the pragmatics of non-honorific styles can be complex and learners frequently encounter these styles outside of class, even when their Korean level is rudimentary. I argue that this lack of emphasis on non-honorific language is not limited to Korean but represents a common tendency within language pedagogy to avoid language that is considered ‘casual’ or ‘impolite’. With traditional teaching materials doing a poor job at representing these facets of language use, the solution I put forward is the use of multimedia activities. These activities are designed specifically to raise consciousness of the pragmatic factors influencing the use of non-honorific styles.

Keywords:

• Korean
• honorifics
• impoliteness
• teaching methods

Notes

Dewaele (2010, p. 13) recounts a surprisingly similar episode when he found himself lost for appropriately impolite words in Spanish during an incident at Porto airport. Dewaele's recounting of his experience motivated me to reconsider my own encounter and, ultimately, to include it as the starting point for this article.

I use politeness here in a ‘politeness1’ sense (Watts, Ide, & Ehlich, 1992), in other words, to refer to lay perceptions of what constitutes ‘polite’ behavior. As argued in Brown (2011b), the appropriate use of honorifics is closely correlated with the meaning of ‘politeness’ by Korean native speakers.

In this article, I apply panmal according to the lay definition of the term. This meaning is broader than that commonly applied in formal linguistics, where it is used only to refer to the –e style of speech.

In this article, I apply KSL as a general term to refer to Korean language learning in all contexts, both in Korea and overseas. As such the term encapsulates what is more frequently referred to as KFL (Korean as a Foreign Language).

Although this claim illustrates the point well, as previously pointed out in Brown (2011a, p. 27), the Korean president Lee Myung-bak (2008–) has been criticised in the press on several occasions for using non-honorific language to adult strangers!

Previous research has shown that inductive approaches may not be as effective as deductive approaches, at least for some pragmatic features (e.g. Rose & Ng, 2001). Despite this, inductive approaches were chosen for the materials used in this study largely because deductive approaches had already been used to teach the basic pragmatic functions of –e and –ta in the previous classroom session. The decision to use inductive approaches should therefore not be understood as embodying any claim regarding their superiority. In fact, the author believes that a mixture of carefully designed deductive and inductive activities may represent the most suitable way to teach pragmatics in the language classroom.

Although the class was 100 minutes in duration, only 90 minutes were available for this activity due to various ‘housekeeping’ tasks.

As noted in Brown (2011b, p. 119), although this traditional norm still holds weight, it is not necessarily followed by younger couples, particularly when interacting in private.

As the number of students was insufficient, the instructor played the role of Soo-hyuk for both groups.

One example in the recent literature is Li's (2012) study of input-based practice on the development of requests in L2 Chinese. The pragmatics of L2 requests were taught through a ‘minilecture’ based on a static description of Chinese requests adopting the ‘rule’ that Chinese speakers prefer direct request strategies in intimate relationships of equal power and conventionally indirect strategies when addressing status superiors. Different levels of practice were then provided through a computerised course of instruction where learners were asked to select the ‘correct’ responses regarding how much imposition was associated with a particular request and then which request form was ‘most appropriate’.