Jung conducted a study with ten advanced Korean
students of English as a Foreign Language and ten English
native speakers investigating their apologetic behavior in two different situations. The students were asked to act out a short scene where one of them had to apologize for missing a meeting, once with a friend and once with a professor. The Korean students acted out every situation twice, once in English and once in Korean. She analyzed the data not only calculating the frequency with which the participants had
used each of five
apology strategies discussed in the introduction<1>, but she also examined the amount of background information they gave, how they addressed their interlocutor, etc.
There were some significant differences in the apology strategies the Koreans used in their L1 and in the L2 and also between native and non-native speakers, but there are only speculations about the reasons. For some of the Korean students’ difficulties of expressing themselves appropriately and discrepancies between L1 and L2 use, Jung assumes an inferiority complex because of their first language and/or nationality. Furthermore, she addresses cultural factors such as the different values concerning status and hierarchy in Korea and the USA. The question what the Korean students (who had lived in the USA for at least 1.5 years) use as model for native speaker norms remains unanswered.
I strongly agree with Jung’s remark that the instrument of role-play and the relatively small sample size do not raise the claim to provide representative results. Nonetheless, the study has important implications on how and when sociolinguistic awareness is (not) acquired.
<1> i.e., expression of apology, explanation, acknowledgement of responsibility, offer of repair and promise of non-recurrence
More summaries about the Interlanguage pragmatics. Apology speech acts