A Cross‐Cultural Pragmatic Study of Complaints between American Native Speakers and Korean Nonnative Speakers of English

Abstract

Complaint is a face threatening speech act with no predetermined pattern, hence, it poses a challenge to many nonnative speakers of English (NNS). This paper examined complaint strategies used by American native speakers (NS) of English and Korean NNS consisting of ESL and EFL groups by using a discourse completion task (DCT). The participants were generally assumed to have advanced literacy and communication competence since all of them were graduate students specializing in TESOL or English Education. The findings showed, unlike those in earlier studies, the NNS group’s use of complaint strategies were quite similar to that of the NSs, mostly employing direct complaint. Among Korean participants, both ESL and EFL groups registered similar complaint types; however, EFL groups were more prone to employ indirect complaint―being more sensitive to social status while ESL group mostly opted direct complaint similarly to their American counterparts.