Variability and Pragmatic Naturalness in the Performance of English Greetings

Variability and Pragmatic Naturalness in the Performance of English Greetings

This paper investigates how variably and how appropriately Korean EFL students choose American English greeting patterns and responses. To this end, the data on greeting act behavior were collected from 193 university students using both oral role-play and written questionnaire tasks, based on different situations. The results showed that the Korean L2 performers overall were limited in their selection of greeting and response strategies. In particular, it substantiated the popular belief that Korean EFL learners typically say 'Hi! How are you?' and 'Fine, thanks (And you?)'. This paper also proposed a pragmatic naturalness hierarchy for non-native expressions of greetings, ranging from the native-like perfect to the least natural categories. Viewed in terms of Thomas's notion. pragmalinguistic failure was shown to be predominant with a few instances of sociopragmatic failure. The findings suggest that instructors should help their students to enrich their repertoire of greetings. In order to minimize learners' pragmatic failure, instructors should lead their students to engage in day-to-day interactions using greetings in a variety of situations so that the students can choose the most appropriate expression considering a given situation and/or context.