Interlanguage development of young Korean EFL learners' modal usage: A learner corpus study

Daria Soon Young Seog, Incheol Choi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

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).

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)83-103
Number of pages21
JournalLinguistic Research
Volume35
Issue numberSpecialissue
DOIs
StatePublished - 2018

Keywords

  • Epistemic modality
  • Foreign language acquisition
  • Learner corpus
  • Modal verbs
  • Root modality
  • Second language acquisition

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