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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.342-357
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 24 Mar 2023 Revised 13 Apr 2023 Accepted 15 May 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202305.342

Korean EFL Learners’ Underuse of the English Perfect: A Collostructional Analysis of Written Learner Corpora

Kang San Noh ; Sanghoun Song
(1st author) Graduate Student, Dept. of Linguistics, Korea Univ., Tel: +82-2-3290-1648 kasan1998@korea.ac.kr
(corresponding author) Associate Professor, Dept. of Linguistics, Korea Univ., Tel: +82-2-3290-2177 sanghoun@korea.ac.kr


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study examines whether and how Korean EFL learners underuse verbal lexemes as the English perfect using a series of corpus-based methods involving two written learner corpora, which amount to 3,590,194 words in total. It is difficult to detect which forms are significantly underused by language learners because the underused patterns are such that the learners avoid producing them in the data and are therefore less visible, unlike the overused patterns. Accordingly, the current work performs collostructional analysis to measure the association strength between the perfect construction and the specific verbal lexemes, thereby demonstrating that collostructional analysis works effectively to reveal the underused patterns in the language learners’ data. The collostructional analysis reveals that 416 verbal lexemes were underused while only 4 verbal lexemes were overused. It is proposed that this underuse behavior of Korean EFL learners might result from the lack of grammatical markers for the perfect in Korean and the use of temporal adverbials. Along this line of research, this paper proposes the effectiveness of collostructional analysis in measuring associations and potential pedagogical implications.

Keywords:

association strength, collostructional analysis, English perfect, learner corpora, underuse

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Korea University Insung Research Grant.

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