Motivation, amount of interaction, length of residence, and ESL learners’ pragmatic competence

This study examined how motivation for learning english, the amount of contact with english, and length of residence in the target language area affects korean graduate students’ english pragmatic skills. the study attempted to account for differential pragmatic development among 50 graduate-level korean students in relation to individual factors mentioned above. the data were collected using three types of elicitation instruments: a written background questionnaire, a discourse completion test, and the mini-attitude/motivation test battery. descriptive and inferential statistics (correlation coefficients, and multiple regressions) were used to analyze the data. the findings of the study revealed that (a) the level of motivation had a positive and moderate relationship with the esl learners’ l2 pragmatic competence; and (b) the amount of l2 contact and length of residence had only a weak and insignificant impact on the participants’ pragmatic competence.