A preliminary study reported in this paper examined Chafe's(1986) and Toulmin-Freeley's(1993) degree categories of reliability/cogency of statements in linguistics and of practical reasoning in English in order to compare them to those of Korean statement reliability categories. The comparison was expected to reveal any necessity for teaching the categories of reliability in English with a visual program to Korean EFL students. The comparison of the two 5-level and 4-level categories in English revealed that no exact equivalent was found in Korea, this yields the conclusion that we need to organize a visual program for the teaching of the categories to Koreans because a translation method of teaching them would be far less effective than a visual program. The reliability level of the conclusions of this study will be upgraded when an experimental study of teaching the degrees of reliability confirms the conclusions of this study together with a further study of comparisons of Korean and English degree categories of reliability in the future. |