초록 열기/닫기 버튼
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.
