earticle

영어

With the development in the research in language education, there has been a continued interest in the error patterns exhibited by non-mother tongue learners of Korean. In the process it has been discovered that one major difference between mother tongue and non-mother tongue learners in the interpretation of concrete noun+ha- verb construction was false analogy. It’s important to note that this false analogy is due to the incorrect way the relevant vocabulary is presented in the textbooks for foreigners. This paper is a computational analysis of Korean verbs in which Noun+ha- is the analytical focus. I compare the ratio of the total number of verbs vis-à-vis Noun+ha- type verbs, and the ratio of Noun+ha- verbs vis-à-vis concrete noun+ha- compound verbs in 42 textbooks of beginning and intermediate levels that are currently in use in 10 institutions teaching Korean to non-mother tongue. I examine the extent of inclusion of concrete noun+haverbs as a function of levels, and compute the ratio of new and recurring words both in the main text and exercises as an index of the text’s level of difficulty. Following inferences can be drawn from the analysis: Texts with a greater frequency of Noun+ha- verbs have more Sino-Korean vocabulary; the degree of difficulty is higher if the text contains more N+ha- verbs than the Copula or Adjective construction and descriptive sentences. One important finding is that in most texts there was no systematic link between the Nouns+ha- verb and the concrete noun+ha- verbs. In conclusion I argue that it is necessary to teach the multiple functions of ha-verbs, and that it is imperative to teach more systematically and consistently the relation between the predicate noun+ha- type verbs and the concrete noun+hacompound type verbs.