영어 중의성에 대한 한국 고등학생들의 이해에 관한 연구

Abstract

This study investigates Korean high school students’ understanding of ambiguity in English. The focus is on how well they judge whether sentences are ambiguous and how they interpret ambiguous sentences. The subjects are 80 high school students in Busan, Korea. They are divided into two groups in accordance with their general English ability. A total of 20 sentences were tested. The results are as follows. First, the average score of ambiguity recognition was only 48.44%, which is considerably low, and the high level group(57.0%) was better than the low level group(39.88%). Second, there was a significant correlation (r=.571) between general English ability and ambiguity recognition. Third, they showed a strong tendency(75.0%, 15 out of 20) to interpret ambiguous sentences in a biased fashion one way or the other. In some cases, pragmatic factors seem to affect the way they interpret ambiguous sentences. The above results say that Korean high school students’ knowledge of various meanings of lexical items and sentence structure is considerably poor. Hence, school teachers are required to provide students with reading materials which contain a rich variety of content.