Native and Nonnative Strategies of Encouragement in English Interaction

This study aims to investigate how English speakers and Korean EFL learners employ strategies of encouragement in communication. In order to collect data, it used the Discourse Completion Task. A total of 194 students participated in this study. From the data analysis, fifteen categories were identified which made up the speech act of encouragement. The results also showed that both native and nonnative speakers varied in their strategies of encouragement in different contexts: The native speakers employed the categories of assuring and being implicit more frequently than the nonnative speakers, whereas the latter speaker group tended to rely on cheering up, worrying, and sympathizing more heavily than the former. It further found different facets of pragmatic failure: (a) a language expression which is present in English, but whose form and meaning are totally different from native speaker use; (b) an expression which is absent in English but whose meaning is approximate to English intended meaning; (c) an expression which is present in English but is not appropriate to a given situation; (d) an expression which is neither present in English nor appropriate to a given situation but whose meaning is approximate to English intended meaning; and (e) an expression which is hard to interpret. On the basis of these results, suggestions are made for enhancing pragmatic competence in L2 acquisition.