earticle

영어

The goal of this paper is to investigate Korean high school students' collocation knowledge of English adjective synonyms. Four pairs of synonymous adjectives were tested. The subjects are 100 high school students, who are divided into 2 different groups(high and low level students) according to their grades on the mid-term exam. The result was as follows. First, the average score of the whole high school students was 74.10%, and the high level students' score(78.88%) was higher than the low level students(69.31%). The order of average scores by synonymous adjectives was fast/quick(83.38%)> clean/clear(82%)> wide/broad (67.88%)> strong/powerful(63.13%). Second, there was a low correlation(r=.447) between their general English ability and collocational knowledge. Third, in some collocations(powerful argument, strong accent, quick temper), the low level group's score was higher than the high level group. The result of this study shows that Korean high students' collocation knowledge of these synonymous adjectives is considerably poor and unbalanced. We need to change individual word-based teaching to collocational chunk-based teaching to improve Korean EFL learners' communicative ability. Also, corpus is useful in teaching and learning collocations since corpus is full of a variety of useful collocational expressions frequently used in daily life.