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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 20, No. 1, pp.851-880
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print)
Print publication date 31 Mar 2020
Received 13 Dec 2020 Revised 20 Dec 2020 Accepted 23 Dec 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.20..202012.851

On the Source Words for Loanwords of the 2015 Revised National Curriculum of English

Jiyong Lee
Konkuk University


Copyright 2020 KASELL
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that English loanwords that are true cognates can clearly be a valuable resource for Korean learners of English. This paper aimed to examine whether the 200 English source words in the 2015 RNCE and their Korean counterparts are true cognates, and whether the latter are in fact commonly used in everyday life. Careful scrutiny of the relationships to their Korean equivalents shows that some source words are phonologically or morphologically opaque and others fail to have a one-to-one correspondence in terms of meaning or usage. Moreover, the corpus-based investigation conducted in the present work shows that some of the 200 source words in the 2015 RNCE are ones whose Korean counterparts are not of high frequency and wide range. Because the selection of English source words listed in the RNCE has a substantial effect on English L2 learning, especially L2 vocabulary acquisition, more rigorous criteria must first be established on which the selection of such words can be based.

Keywords:

2015 RNCE, basic vocabulary, source word for loanword, true cognate

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Lee, JiyongPostdoctoral researcher, Department of English EducationKonkuk University120 Neungdong-ro, Gwangjin-guSeoul, KoreaTel: 02) 450-3906Email: jiyonglee0123@gmail.com