초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Building on Seog and Choi’s (2018) documentation of the early to intermediate interlanguage development of Korean learners’ English modal use, the current paper focuses on the highly advanced Korean learners and sheds light on the spectrum of interlanguage of Korean EFL learners in acquisition of the English modal verbs. For investigation and analyses, two learner corpora, the KNU Student English Learner Corpus-Written (KSELC-W) and the KNU English Learner Corpus (KELC), and a native speaker corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), are utilized. Corpora comparisons and log-likelihood tests are conducted to reveal differences in the modal verb usage. The results show that in contrast with the early or intermediate young learners of KELC, the advanced learners of KSELC-W overuse the preterite forms of modal verbs such as could, would, and should. In addition, the learners productively and accurately used would to deliver the hypothetical sense while rarely using the modal verbs to express the epistemic sense. This study can represent the overall process of the Korean learners’ acquisition of English modal verbs.
