Korean EFL Learners' Cognitive Tendencies in Critical Reading of Argumentative Texts

This article reports some Korean EFL learners' cognitive tendencies drawn up from their responses to logical fallacies in the argument passages, and its pedagogical implications. The findings of experimental study show the meaningful disparities in three sets of judgment tests designed to identify and explicate faulty arguments: based on the three general types of fallacies using language, emotions, and distraction tactics, subjects on average gained the highest scores in the test questions with language-loaded fallacies and the lowest scores in those with emotion-based ones among the three different types; for this reason, the scores that subjects obtained in the test of distraction-loaded fallacious arguments fell in between the two poles. These discrepancies, mainly based on statistical inferences, support the possibility that the Korean EFL learners are most likely to be manipulated by emotions/distraction- loaded argument tactics than by language-based ones in the three types of fallacious arguments; and, they are least likely to be influenced by language-oriented trickeries. As a consequence, such variances in abilities to recognize the intrinsic elements of logical fallacies suggest some basic instructional approaches to critical reading of argumentative texts with due weights on the Korean EFL learners' culture-specific cognitive tendencies.