earticle

영어

The positive interpretation of learner errors shows that errors are systematic and that they are to reveal the learners' transitional competence, i.e., how well they process the target language. The researcher has explored both the typology of the errors Korean college freshmen made in their essay assignment and the possible source of the errors so as to find out the aspects of the students' L2 processing and of their L2 acquisition. The subjects were made up of 20 medical students and 20 non-medical students studying at a university in Seoul. Data elicitation was done via the evaluation of the T-unit performance and the identification of the 13 morpho- syntactic error types. The results net: (1) varying degrees of analogy or overgeneralization errors; (2) the simplification or addition of morpho-syntactic units to economize the information processing; (3) transfer phenomena equivalent to juxtapositional speech, etc. These errors seem to contain a certain complexity that cannot be fully interpreted only in terms with the traditional view of L2 processing. It appears that the explanation must involve either the Pidginists' theory or the multifaceted network architecture of Connectionism. The findings of the study are also thought to indicate that there must be a careful way to be developed for helping the students emerge from the possible pidginization or fossilization of their L2 system.