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This paper examines the distribution and functions of actually and in fact in the writings of Korean learners of English. Narrative and argumentative essays (342,818 words) written by college freshmen at two proficiency levels (beginner and high-intermediate) were selected from the Yonsei English Learner Corpus (YELC) for an analysis. Building upon Oh (2000) and Aijmer (2013), the positions and functions of these two expressions were analyzed, revealing the following: 1) The English learners produced more tokens of the two adverbs than NS writers as reported in previous research. 2) English proficiency was shown to interact with the use of the two adverbs; the high level learners produced more tokens of actually and in fact, especially in the argumentative writing. 3) The positional distribution of the two items in the learner written corpus exhibited a pattern similar to that found in NS spoken language. 4) The most frequent function of actually in the learner data was as a factuality marker, a pattern inconsistent with what was observed in NS texts, in which actually was observed to be preferred as an adversative marker and in fact as an elaboration marker. Developmental dimensions and L1 transfer are considered possible factors to account for the learners’ performance.
