대한언어학회 전자저널

Seog, Daria Soon-Young. (2018). A corpus-based study of the use of English articles by Korean EFL learners. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 26(1), 57-73. The current paper reports on the investigation of Korean college EFL learners use of the English articles: the, a(n), and Ø (the zero or null article). A comparison analysis was conducted on the researcher compiled learner corpus, the Kyungpook National University Student English Learner Corpus-Writing (KSELC-W), and a native speaker (NS) corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). For this study, the learner corpus, KSELC-W, consisted of 145 writing samples from 74 university students which were collected over three semesters. Log-likelihood calculations showed that the Korean learners in this study significantly overused the and significantly underused a(n) and Ø compared to the NSs of English. According to Huebner (1983a), the students in this study are in Stage 2 of the six stages in the definite article acquisition process where the-flooding is marked and overgeneralization occurs. Furthermore, the students in this study exhibit L2 article production behavior consistent with Stage 5, the > a(n) > Ø, of the five-stage developmental sequence in L2 frequency of article production proposed by Wolfe-Quintero (2000). The current study sheds some light on conducting corpora comparison analyses to supplement existing research on the L2 English article acquisition process.

# English articles # learner corpus # second language acquisition # comparison of corpora # Korean EFL learners

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