earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to infer the developmental process of a Korean elementary school student's communicative competence. The informant, who was randomly chosen among the students from an elementary school attached to the university the researcher is working at, was interviewed during his lunch break. Each interview lasted around ten minutes. The data was collected over three semesters during three academic years from 2002 to 2004, one semester per year. The analysis focused on the following: (i) How does the informant's will to communicate in English change?; (ii) How has his communicative competence developed as time goes on? The mean length of utterance(MLU) was measured and the change in word tokens and the structural patterns of his utterances were analyzed. The following are the results: first, the number of word tokens and the MLU increased as interviews were repeated. Second, the informant's grammar was somewhat unstable but developed steadily.