Learner Corpus Investigation of English Verb Morpheme Acquisition by Korean EFL Learners

초록

The purpose of this study is twofold: to investigate the accuracy order of English verb grammatical morphemes, progressive -ing, irregular past, regular past –ed, and 3rd person singular -s, in the writing products of 9th grade middle school students in Korea and to compare the resulting accuracy order with the frequency of the English verb grammatical morphemes present in the Korean middle school English textbooks for correlation. The present study analyzed 262 essays from Korean middle school 9th graders learning English as a foreign language (EFL) and 36 English textbooks. The findings indicate that the Korean 9th grade middle school students acquired the grammatical morphemes in the following order: progressive -ing > irregular past > regular past -ed > 3rd person singular -s. In addition, the result showed a meaningful correlation with the occurrence frequency of the four grammatical morphemes in the Korean English textbooks. Furthermore, in comparing the results of the current study with previous ESL and EFL studies, statistically significant correlations were observed.

키워드