Interlanguage development of young Korean EFL learners’ modal usage: A learner corpus study

• 발행기관: 경희대학교 언어정보연구소
• 저자명: Daria Soon-Young Seog Incheol Choi
• 간행물 정보: 『언어연구』제35권 Special Edition, 83~103쪽, 전체 21쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 언어학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2018.09.30

영문 초록

The current paper reports on a comparison study conducted between a learner corpus, the KNU English Learner Corpus (KELC), and a native speaker corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), to investigate in what ways and to what extent the young Korean learners of KELC use English modal verbs. The results reveal that the young Korean learners underused modals could, would, should, may, might and must in general. However, will and can were used frequently with a statistically significant overuse of will occurring after the intermediate level. Furthermore, interlanguage development is observed with nativelike usage frequency of can from the earlier stages while occurrences of should and would emerging at later stages. A closer examination of the observed under and over usages also discloses that the difficulty of combining tense with the modal verbs impedes the learners’ preterit form use of the modal verbs. Additionally, the use of epistemic modality is observed much later than the root modality such as possibility, permission, and ability. These findings coincide with the first language modal acquisition order reported in literature (Coates 1983).

목차

1. Introduction

2. Modal verbs in the acquisition literature

3. Learner corpus: KELC

4. Results

5. Analyses and Discussion

6. Conclusion

키워드

modal verbs learner corpus foreign language acquisition second language acquisition epistemic modality root modality