earticle

영어

This study attempts to explore the proposition that there will be a natural morpheme acquisition order in Korean elementary school learners' English. A cross-sectional study was done to obtain the acquisition order of twelve English morphemes. The subjects were 30 students of age 9 in an elementary school in Daegu. Speaking tests were administered with pictures specially designed to elicit the English morphemes. The result is that a universal acquisition order was not found in the Korean situation. This study supposes that this is due to extralinguistic factors that hamper natural language acquisition in the EFL situation. Those hampering factors to the universal acquisition order are L1 transfer, previous learning, input frequency, exposure type, age difference, and semantic/syntactic complexity. To get a real picture of language acquisition in the EFL situation these factors need to be considered in future studies. However, it is noticeable that in this study a meaningful hierarchy of the morpheme acquisition order was obtained which reflects Korean elementary school children's learning processes.