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Investigating Ideational Thematic Content in Korean University Student Essay Writing

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초록

This study aims to investigate Korean university students’ ways of distributing information in written English discourse, by examining lexico-semantic properties of themes in their English essay writing, in close reference to those in their Australian counterparts’ writing. To that end, it analyzed 35 texts (20 texts by Korean university students and 15 by Australian university students), using a systemic functional linguistic concept of theme, in particular ‘ideational theme’. The results of the study have shown that most of all, Korean EFL university students tend to strongly personalize their essay writing, frequently employing ‘interactional’ (Brown & Yule, 1983) and/or narrative discourse features in initial thematic position. They were also found to have a tendency to develop ideas rather narrowly, often focusing on a few selected major text participants. These results show that Korean university students lack experience and training in conceptualizing ideas in the formal written mode, strongly suggesting the need to teach them explicitly to use appropriate discourse features in various modes and genres of writing. The findings are expected to help Korean EFL university students understand and learn some characteristic discourse features of formal English essay writing and produce extended writing in formal English appropriately in internationalized tertiary contexts.

Abstract

This study aims to investigate Korean university students’ ways of distributing information in written English discourse, by examining lexico-semantic properties of themes in their English essay writing, in close reference to those in their Australian counterparts’ writing. To that end, it analyzed 35 texts (20 texts by Korean university students and 15 by Australian university students), using a systemic functional linguistic concept of theme, in particular ‘ideational theme’. The results of the study have shown that most of all, Korean EFL university students tend to strongly personalize their essay writing, frequently employing ‘interactional’ (Brown & Yule, 1983) and/or narrative discourse features in initial thematic position. They were also found to have a tendency to develop ideas rather narrowly, often focusing on a few selected major text participants. These results show that Korean university students lack experience and training in conceptualizing ideas in the formal written mode, strongly suggesting the need to teach them explicitly to use appropriate discourse features in various modes and genres of writing. The findings are expected to help Korean EFL university students understand and learn some characteristic discourse features of formal English essay writing and produce extended writing in formal English appropriately in internationalized tertiary contexts.

참고문헌 (41)

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