earticle

영어

This study examines the use of the final endings by Chinese migrant workers who were learning Korean in a naturalistic setting without formal instruction. Data collected from 31 migrant workers through semi-structured interviews were analyzed focusing on the sentence enders, connectives, and function-converting enders. The developmental pattern observed was compared with that of L1 children and instructed L2 learners reported in Lee et al. (2003) and Seong (2007), respectively. The results revealed the following: 1) the migrant workers’ use of the final endings increased in accordance with their language proficiency. 2) the subjects had a tendency to overrely on a few enders of their own preference, possibly to avoid errors. 3) the migrant workers produced more sentence enders than connectives or adnominal enders, a pattern different from the instructed learners or native speakers. The influence of language learning contexts and the role of formal instruction in language learning are discussed in relation to the observed results.