Conversational Closings in the EFL Context

This study presents a qualitative analysis of the ways in which Korean university students close conversations in English. The main purpose of the study is to investigate whether the students’ construction of a conversational closing in English reflects the actual patterns of native speakers of English, with particular attention to Korean students’ pragmatic failure. In order to collect data, two research tools were employed: a discourse completion task and native and nonnative speaker interview interactions. The results showed that the learners’ conversational closings varied, depending on the degree of naturalness: native-like, acceptable, somewhat unnatural, not acceptable, and incomplete. The latter three categories are indicative of pragmatic failure. The findings clearly revealed that, overall, Korean EFL learners failed to terminate a conversation in a native-like manner, the failure being not only pragmalinguistic but also sociopragmatic in nature. The specific types of pragmatic failure included lack of elaboration of closing sequences, the absence of a pre-closing, the absence of a terminal exchange, pragmatic transfer, and a violation of social norms. On the basis of these results, suggestions are made for raising learners’ pragmatic awareness of conversational closings.