대한언어학회 전자저널

Cho, Yuhyeon & Kim, Ji-Hye. (2023). English wh-question formation by Korean elementary and middle school EFL students. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 31(3), 157-173. The present study investigated the sentence production of English wh-questions among early Korean EFL learners through a sentence- forming writing task, with a specific focus on the influence of distinct types of wh-pronouns based on their argument structure and grammatical relations. The participants were 64 5th-grade elementary school students and 58 1st-grade middle school students in Seoul. The study utilized English wh-question sentences containing different forms of wh-pronouns (who and what for argument vs. why for adjunct), which varied in their grammatical relations (subject vs. object). The main task was an elicited sentence-forming task aimed at generating wh-question sentences, in which the participants were required to arrange provided words into a coherent question. The key findings are as follows: i) Korean EFL learners did not demonstrate statistically significant asymmetrical response patterns with respect to argument structure of wh-words. ii) As for grammatical relations of wh-words, subject interrogatives displayed higher accuracy compared to object interrogatives. The implications of these findings will be discussed in detail.

# wh-question # argument structure # grammatical relation # Korean EFL learners

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