Erring in English: Korean L1 and Cultural Interference

ABSTRACT Within the region, a number of countries have viewed the importation of native speakers of English as a means of enhancing English language teaching in schools and promoting internationalization or cultural exchange. In this paper, I make some comparative observations about four such schemes, EPIK (English program in Korea), JET (Japan exchange and teaching program) and from Hong Kong, NET (Native-speaking English teacher) and PSED (Primary school English development).

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION, 2015

In terms of structure, languages of the world can be either subject-verb-object (SVO) or subject-object-verb (SOV). English is an example of a SVO language while Korean is a SOV language. Such a difference between languages may have implications for second language (L2) learners learning a language with a different structure from their first language (L1). In view of this, the study investigates the interpretation of verb initial English sentences, i.e. verb-object-subject (VOS) command sentences and verb-subject-object (VSO) inverted reported speech sentences by forty-eight L1 Korean and nine L1 Malaysian Malay L2 English learners. Each group simultaneously heard and read forty randomly sequenced English sentences, each accompanied by two pictures, labeled A and B. Each picture has a girl and a boy. If picture A depicts the girl playing the role of doer and the boy, the role of receiver, then the other picture where their roles are reversed, is picture B. Upon listening to and reading each sentence, participants circled either A or B on a Pictorial Sentence Interpretation Task Sheet provided. Results from independent T-tests comparing the misinterpretation means showed no significant difference between both groups, suggesting that Universal Processing Strategy exhibited by the First Noun Principle accounts for adult L2 acquisition. Furthermore, the findings of the study also revealed that both groups of L2 learners made more misinterpretations in VOS compared to VSO sentences, suggesting that L2 learners tend to (mis)interpret the first noun or pronoun of a sentence as the subject or doer of an action, regardless of its position in the sentence, thus validating VanPatten's First Noun Principle (2007).

Second Language Research, 2014

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the first language (L1) and mapping them onto those that are encoded indirectly, or covertly, in the L2 will present a greater difficulty than reassembling features in the opposite learning direction. An idealized scale of predictions of difficulty is proposed based on the overt or covert character of the feature encoding and the ease/difficulty of noticing the feature expression. A total of 158 participants (56 native Russian, 49 English learners and 53 Korean learners of Russian) evaluated the acceptability of test sentences in context. Findings demonstrate that acquiring the expression of a feature that is encoded contextually in the L2 is challenging for learners, while an overt expression of a feature presents less difficulty. On the basis of the learners' developmental patterns observed in the study, we argue that overt and covert expression of semantic features, feature reassembly, and indirect encoding appear to be significant factors in L2 grammatical feature acquisition.

Second Language Research, 2014

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the first language (L1) and mapping them onto those that are encoded indirectly, or covertly, in the L2 will present a greater difficulty than reassembling features in the opposite learning direction. An idealized scale of predictions of difficulty is proposed based on the overt or covert character of the feature encoding and the ease/difficulty of noticing the feature expression. A total of 158 participants (56 native Russian, 49 English learners and 53 Korean learners of Russian) evaluated the acceptability of test sentences in context. Findings demonstrate that acquiring the expression of a feature that is encoded contextually in the L2 is challenging for learners, while an overt expression of a feature presents less difficulty. On the basis of the learners' developmental patterns observed in the study, we argue that overt and covert expression of semantic features, feature reassembly, and indirect encoding appear to be significant factors in L2 grammatical feature acquisition.

We revisit morpheme studies to evaluate the long-standing claim for a universal order of acquisition. We investigate the L2 acquisition order of six English grammatical morphemes by learners from seven L1 groups across five proficiency levels. Data are drawn from approximately 10,000 written exam scripts from the Cambridge Learner Corpus. The study establishes clear L1 influence on the absolute accuracy of morphemes and their acquisition order, therefore challenging the widely held view that there is a universal order of acquisition of L2 morphemes. Moreover, we find that L1 influence is morpheme specific, with morphemes encoding language-specific concepts most vulnerable to L1 influence.

Bates and MacWhinney and their colleagues (1981, 1982, 1984) have shown that native speakers depend on a particular set of probabilistic cues to assign formal surface devices in their language to a specified set of underlying functions. The research program encompassed by their approach to language processing has extended from describing crosslinguistic processing differences in even typologically similar languages (e.g., English and Italian, both SVO languages), to charting the pattern of acquisition of grammatical ''rules" in the first language , and more recently to crosslanguage investigations of "characteristic" neurological-based language deficits. A natural extension of this broad experimental effort is in a field that involves issues of both language learning and sentence processing in adults: late second language acquisition. Given the large volume of rlata already collected from monolingual speakers, we are now in a position to begin exploration into bilingual sentence processing strategies. In this chapter we report on sentence processing experiments carried out with adults who speak two or more languages. The notion that cues vary in strength has proven valuable in describing the psychologically relevant features of different kinds of languages; it may also provide a window into the psycholinguistic properties of second language acquisition. Students of language study come from many schools; not all share our assumptions or biases regarding the kinds of questions that are germane to second language acquisition, nor what constitutes an answer to those questions. For this reason, we will briefly review a small part of the history of second language acquisition research that lies behind the work presented here. We will focus on two issues: the influence of first language acquisition research on work in second language learning, and the role of rules in characterizing language acquisition of either kind. The Roots of Second Language Acquisition Research The study of second language (L2) acquisition has closely followed developments in first language (L1) research. In this regard, the central empirical issue has been whether the paths taken by the learner during the course of L1

These are two chapters from Vainikka & Young-Scholten (2011) which cover V & Y-S 1994, on Korean and Turkish learners of German, and V & Y-S 1996, on Romance learners of German. New data from English-speaking adolescent naturalistic learners of German are also included.

There has been considerable research in Chinese as a second language (L2) in recent years, particularly in its morphological and syntactic aspects. This article reviews research in these aspects with reference to the broader discipline of second language acquisition (SLA) and suggests that L2 Chinese research has contributed to SLA through verification, modification or posing challenges to research findings in the L2 acquisition of other languages. On the basis of these studies, the author points out the limits of current L2 Chinese research and discusses the prospects for future development, arguing that L2 Chinese is to be investigated against hypotheses based on other L2s so that theoretical contributions can be made to the discipline of SLA.

This authoritative textbook provides an overview and analysis of current second language acquisition research conducted within the generative linguistic framework. Lydia White argues that second language acquisition is constrained by principles and parameters of Universal Grammar. The book focuses on characterizing and explaining the underlying linguistic competence of second language learners in terms of these contraints. Theories as to the role of Universal Grammar and the extent of mother-tongue influence are presented and discussed, with particular consideration given to the nature of the interlanguage grammar at different points in development, from the initial state to the ultimate attainment. Throughout the book, hypotheses maintaining that second language grammars are constrained by universal principles are contrasted with claims that Universal Grammar is not implicated; relevant empirical research is presented from both sides of the debate. This textbook is essential reading for those studying second language acquisition from a linguistic perspective.

2016

The purpose of this study is to examine the acquisition of English articles by Arabic second language (L2) learners of English as a function of different linguistic contexts contrasted based upon two semantic notions: definiteness and specificity. The participants in this study are 30 adult learners of L2 English whose first language (L1) is Arabic. The data for this study consist of the participants’ responses to a forced-choice elicitation task targeting the use of articles in English. The results show that the learners were more accurate in terms of their article usage in definite contexts than in indefinite contexts regardless of specificity. While advanced learners performed native-like and converged to the target system of articles in English in all of the semantic contexts, low proficiency learners and intermediate learners made several errors, the most common of which was article omission in obligatory contexts. Moreover, the results show that the low proficiency learners fluctuated between definiteness and specificity in the two crucial mismatching semantic contexts: [+definite, -specific] and [-definite, +specific], overusing the indefinite article in the former context and overusing the definite article in the latter context. Unlike the low proficiency learners, the intermediate learners did not fluctuate between definiteness and specificity. The study proposes a development model for the acquisition of the English article system by Arabic learners of L2 English incorporating the Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) and drawing on the available sources of linguistic knowledge in second language acquisition (SLA).