Apology Strategies used by Korean Learners of English

This study investigates the impact of sociopragmatic variables such as social status and social distance on the apology strategies used by native speakers of American English and Korean learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in terms of cultural dimensions of individualism/collectivism and low-context/high-context. Thirty native English (NE) speakers, thirty Korean learners of EFL, and thirty native Korean (NK) speakers participated in this study to provide the target language baseline data, the interlanguage (IL) data, and the first language baseline data, respectively. This study evaluated the impact of sociopragmatic variables on apology strategies from Discourse Completion Tests. Results showed that Korean EFL learners apologized less in using an explicit apology than American NE speakers did. In using intensifiers, EFL learners were less discriminating than NE speakers as to which form of intensification would be appropriate in a given situation. EFL speakers have a tendency for not using the explanation strategy compared to American NE speakers. These differences in the speech act of apology between Korean EFL learners and American NE speakers were interpreted in terms of Korean emphasis on hierarchy, collectivism, and high-context communication and American emphasis on egalitarianism, individualism, and low-context communication.