TY - JOUR
T1 - Interlanguage development of young Korean EFL learners' modal usage
T2 - A learner corpus study
AU - Seog, Daria Soon Young
AU - Choi, Incheol
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Institute for the Study of Language and Information.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - The current paper reports on a comparison study conducted between a learner corpus, the KNU English Learner Corpus (KELC), and a native speaker corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), to investigate in what ways and to what extent the young Korean learners of KELC use English modal verbs. The results reveal that the young Korean learners underused modals could, would, should, may, might and must in general. However, will and can were used frequently with a statistically significant overuse of will occurring after the intermediate level. Furthermore, interlanguage development is observed with nativelike usage frequency of can from the earlier stages while occurrences of should and would emerging at later stages. A closer examination of the observed under and over usages also discloses that the difficulty of combining tense with the modal verbs impedes the learners' preterit form use of the modal verbs. Additionally, the use of epistemic modality is observed much later than the root modality such as possibility, permission, and ability. These findings coincide with the first language modal acquisition order reported in literature (Coates 1983).
AB - The current paper reports on a comparison study conducted between a learner corpus, the KNU English Learner Corpus (KELC), and a native speaker corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), to investigate in what ways and to what extent the young Korean learners of KELC use English modal verbs. The results reveal that the young Korean learners underused modals could, would, should, may, might and must in general. However, will and can were used frequently with a statistically significant overuse of will occurring after the intermediate level. Furthermore, interlanguage development is observed with nativelike usage frequency of can from the earlier stages while occurrences of should and would emerging at later stages. A closer examination of the observed under and over usages also discloses that the difficulty of combining tense with the modal verbs impedes the learners' preterit form use of the modal verbs. Additionally, the use of epistemic modality is observed much later than the root modality such as possibility, permission, and ability. These findings coincide with the first language modal acquisition order reported in literature (Coates 1983).
KW - Epistemic modality
KW - Foreign language acquisition
KW - Learner corpus
KW - Modal verbs
KW - Root modality
KW - Second language acquisition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85055938758&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.17250/khisli.35..201809.004
DO - 10.17250/khisli.35..201809.004
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85055938758
SN - 1229-1374
VL - 35
SP - 83
EP - 103
JO - Linguistic Research
JF - Linguistic Research
IS - Specialissue
ER -