English Verb Use in Korean College Students’ Essays: A Corpus-based Study

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study investigates the types and frequencies of verb errors in Korean college students’ essays in order to ascertain what aspects of English verb use Korean learners find most troublesome. The data used in this study were retrieved from a learner corpus consisting of essays written by 399 students who major in humanities at a university in Seoul. The 686 verb errors found in the corpus were classified into the following four major categories: (a) omission of necessary items in a verb phrase,(b) addition of unnecessary items in a verb phrase, (c) misformation of a verb phrase,and (d) misordering of items in a verb phrase. A careful examination of these 686verb errors has revealed that misformation is the most common form of error,accounting for over 60% of all the errors. A sub-category of misformation errors,agreement errors in turn accounted for more than half of all the 416 misformation errors (216 tokens), a number bigger than any of the other three categories of error types, i.e. omission (175 tokens), addition (72 tokens), and misordering (23 tokens).
This finding might have resulted from negative influence from the students’ L1, as Korean verbs do not conjugate according to grammatical person. Another noteworthy finding is the fact that the students made a great number of errors with both the lexical and the auxiliary uses of be and have. Considering that both uses of these two verbs are taught early on in Korea, this finding suggests that Korean students need to be continually provided with contexts in which they can practice different uses of be and have.

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