| Over the two decades since the establishment of diplomatic relationship between China and South Korea, an increasing number of universities in China have involved the Korean language as a specific major in the undergraduate program, hence growing attention attached to the teaching of the Korean language. Various contrastive studies have been carried out in seeking similarities and differences between the two languages from multiple perspectives, such as vocabulary and grammar. Of closer relevance to the teaching of the Korean language is research on textbooks, which play a major role in learners’experience with the language. Based on textbooks of Korean compiled for beginners, this paper makes a thorough analysis of the dialogues in the textbooks. It adopts the novel perspective of pragmatics, which breaks away from the traditional approaches in the assessment of textbooks, with an overt focus on vocabulary, grammar, components, etc.Theoretical grounding for this research is Grice’s Cooperative Principle, which pronounces four conversational maxims, i.e. maxim of quality, maxim of quantity, maxim of relevance, and maxim of manner. Based on Grice’s categorization and politeness theory, the research explores into the dialogues in the textbooks in question and calculates number of cases in which each of the maxims are observed or flouted, with detailed interpretation for the intended message conveyed in each flouted case. By focusing on the frequency and implied meaning of the identified cases, it intends to evaluate the difficulty level and validity of the textbooks, i.e. whether the designed conversations are pragmatically real, whether they can be considered compatible with the habit of conversation, time and specific language setting, and whether they can cater to the real needs of learners. Generally speaking, the study is intended to offer some pedagogical implications to research on the Korean language, Korean language teaching and textbook compilation. |
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