Linguistic Directness and Complaints in Korean EFL Context

Complaints have been studied from the major disciplinary perspective which assumes the correlation between linguistic directness and face-threat. Following the interactional approach, however, this study aimed to disentangle linguistic directness from the perceived face-threat. The study investigated the speech act of complaint by comparing the performance of native English speakers and Korean L2 learners in terms of the degree of linguistic directness and explicitness. 32 subjects participated in the study and they were divided into three groups: a group of native English speakers and two groups of Korean l2 learners of different proficiency levels. The questionnaire with a discourse completion task were employed to collect data. The questionnaire gave six complaint situations in which subjects were asked to write their responses. The responses were coded using the taxonomy of linguistic directness proposed by (Decock & Depraetere, 2018). The results showed that there are some discrepancies between native speakers and Korean L2 learners in their performance of complaining and L2 proficiency influenced the overall production of complaints. The findings offer accurate insights into the degrees and types of linguistic directness in complaint speech act across contexts.