The purpose of this study is to examine how hedging expressions in terms of lexicon and syntactic structure were presented in English listening test of Korean CSAT as a necessary communication for Korean learners. An-other purpose of this study is to ...
The purpose of this study is to examine how hedging expressions in terms of lexicon and syntactic structure were presented in English listening test of Korean CSAT as a necessary communication for Korean learners. An-other purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between hedging expressions used in the listening test of Korean CSAT and the National Curriculum. A spoken corpus used in this study was constructed with the listening test of the CSAT from 1994 to 2022 respectively.
According to Nunan(1991)’s classification of spoken language, the listening test items were divided into two groups, the monologue and dialogue, to figure out differences of their linguistic properties in the pragmatic strategies. The instrument utilized in this study was Crompton(1997) and Kim(2008)’s taxonomy of hedges have been modified and supplemented.
The findings of this study are as follows. First, hedging expressions used in English listening test in Korean CSAT appear depending on given taxonomy of hedges differently. The lexical hedging expressions accounted for 22.08% in all test items, while the syntactic hedging expressions ac-counted for less than 6% in all test items. In other words, the listening test in Korean CSAT usually utilizes lexical hedging expressions more than syntactic ones.
Second, hedging expressions used in English listening test in Korean CAST appear depending on the type of linguistic data differently. Among the lexical hedging expressions, epistemic words were utilized more highly in dialogues than monologues, while modal verbs were utilized more highly in monologues than dialogues. Among the syntactical hedging expressions, all type of linguistic data has the most frequent use of the addictive clause in common. But The rate of all syntactical hedging expressions in the monologues was approximately six times higher than in the dialogues. In addition, some hedging expressions have different meanings depending on the type of linguistic data, even if they are the same forms. For example, modal verbs were mainly used for showing politeness to the interlocutor in dialogues, while they were used for various objectives.
Third, according to the distribution of hedging expressions in the National Curriculum periods which are from sixth one to revised one in 2015, hedging expressions were presented differently. In terms of the type of linguistic data, hedging expressions used in monologues accounted for about 50% since sixth one(44.4%), the expressions used in dialogues accounted for less than 30% from sixth one to revised one in 2015 respectively. In terms of the taxonomy of hedges, lexical hedging expressions were presented about four times higher than syntactical ones in all data. However, all hedging expressions without the types of linguistic data accounted for less than a third of all sentences, and they showed a gap of less than 10% in the National Curriculum periods respectively. It means that even though the importance of communication strategies for learners’ fluency is getting higher, the National Curriculum doesn’t seem to recognize the need for in-depth learning of spoken data.
Based upon these findings, this study is to make the following educative suggestions in Korean CSAT. First, ESL learners need to learn the most frequently hedging expressions according to the listening items for effectiveness. In other words, students can improve their communicative skills quickly and authentically if they learn syntactic structures at first in the monologue and then they learn lexical ones in the dialogue.
Second, even though same hedging expressions were used, their meaning can be different. Therefore, the learners had better analyze with other corpora such as BNC to communicate with people matching the social con-texts.
Lastly, the result of this study will be utilized usefully so that students perceive the importance of hedging expressions in the Korean CSAT and its listening items can be increased the authenticity of used linguistic data as well. Therefore, it contributes to realize the ultimate objectives of the National curriculum, learners’ fluency of communication through the hedging expressions.