earticle

영어

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between adult Korean EFL learners' overall proficiency and their vocabulary knowledge by examining how the vocabulary knowledge that Korean learners have about English verbs is related to their overall English proficiency. For this study, data were collected from Korean EFL learners through a vocabulary knowledge test which focuses on semantic, morphological, and syntactic properties of English verbs and a TOEIC test. The results showed that there was a positive correlation between their vocabulary tests scores and TOEIC scores. It was also found that the syntactic part of the vocabulary test had the highest correlation with the TOEIC scores. In particular, the syntactic property of lexical knowledge was found to be the most important predictor of English proficiency. Based on these findings, it was argued that the qualitative/in-depth view of L2 lexical knowledge might be appropriate for explaining the interdependent nature of vocabulary knowledge and language proficiency, since this qualitative perspective sees lexical knowledge as consisting of various properties such as semantic, morphological, and syntactic features