The characteristics of communication in the Korean language are greatly influenced by Confucian customs, According to age, Koreans are conscious of the hierarchical relationship and use appropriate honorifics in the context of the Confucian hierarchical culture. In addition, according to Confucianism, male-centered culture's ideology, more feminine expressions are developed compared to Western countries.
This study examined that the relationship between communication and sociolinguistic variables, the importance of intercultural communication skills in foreign language learning. It also looked into politeness strategy in Korean language while checking the korean characters of pragmatics. Based on this, this study analyzed the relationship between the dialogue participants in the dialogues of textbooks.
All of the textbooks were mainly foreign learners in twenties who were learning Korean at the korean language institute of universties. Therefore, conversations in textbooks are not shown so much Confucian hierarchical culture in real korean society. Because the conversational participants in dialogues are Korean learners and the same age of Korean friends, there are a few the honorific method in dialogues, such as mainly 'pre-final ending -si(시)'. Most of the dialogues are composed of '-Haeyoche(해요체)' or '-Haechae(해체)' as a casual style, and the official form of '-Hapsyo-che(합쇼체)' is used to present a topic in the class, that cannot be regarded as the context of the Confucian hierarchical culture of Korean society. For this reason, the pragmatic educational aspect of learning Korean usage is not enough in the textbook. Dialogues in Korean textbooks at the intermediate and advanced level should show the Confucian hierarchical culture of Korean society, the use of honorifics, euphemistic and somewhat eloquent feminine tones while considering the pragmatic education. In the case of intermediate-level Korean learners, it is necessary to improve communication ability to use a language appropriate to the customs and culture of Korean society. So this study suggests that it is necessary to set the relationship of the dialogue participants in a more diverse way to show that.
Among the dialogues in the textbooks, some dialogues show that Korean style politeness strategy, for example, Speakers present their opinions by an estimating expression that dosen't have function to estimate, make a request by interrogative sentence which dose not have function to interogate instead of imperative sentence. a negative expression sometimes is used to show the statement or the request softly in Korean language too. It would help to make weaken the speaker's assertion in the polite moods. However, if foreign learners do not know that it is a polite strategy in dialogue, they may experience a pragmatic failure of misunderstanding the meaning of word. So this study also suggests that the teaching materials or textbooks should explain the Korean politeness strategy and the pragmatic characteristics of Korean language considering the pragmatic education together with the dialogues.
As mentioned above, this study believes that it can help reduce the pragmatic errors that intermediate and advanced level Korean learners may make during communicating in Korean society and achieve successful communication.