학문 목적 한국어 학습자의 토론 수행에서 주제 친숙도가 담화 응집성에 미치는 영향

How topic familiarity of those learning Korean for academic purpose affects discourse cohesiveness during discussion

The purpose of this study is to find out how topic familiarity of those learning Korean for academic purpose affects discourse coherence during discussion. During discussion, an important ability is to precisely understand the context of discourse and unfold insistence and proof fit for the context. Discussion with insistence and proof fit for the context has strong coherence. This study focused on the concept of ‘topic familiarity’ in a try to find out ways for those learning Korean to produce more coherent discussion discourse. So-far second language education has researched correlation between topic familiarity and learner’s performance mostly in the comprehension realm such as reading and listening. Researches in that realm have reported much higher comprehension when learners read or listen to texts with topics familiar to them. This study’s experiment, however, showed different result in the expression realm such as speaking. This study had 26 learners of Korean for academic purpose have discussion both on topics familiar and unfamiliar to them, which result showed that they produced more coherent discourse when discussing unfamiliar topics. This result may come from their enough preparation for insistence and proof before discussion is made during high-level Korean speaking class. It can be seen that learners make thorough preparation for proof and logic when they have to discuss unfamiliar topics and such preparation lead to more coherent discourse.