코퍼스에 기반한 한국 중학생의 영어 유의어 연어능력에 관한 연구

Abstract

This study investigates Korean middle school students’ collocation ability of English synonymous verbs and adjectives. The focus is on how well Korean middle school students understand the difference in collocation between these synonymous words. The subjects are a total of 73 middle school students. They are divided into two groups according to their grade on midterm exams, a high level group and a low level group. Five pairs of verbs and adjectives, such as look/see, tell/say, large/big, little/small, tall/high were tested.The results are as follows. First, students are better in adjectives than verbs. Second, there are some questions which are pretty easy and familiar, but students do not answer correctly. This indicates that simple exposure to sentences with these words is not enough for foreign learners to acquire the appropriate use of these five pairs of synonymous words. Third, it is found that learners’ general English ability correlates with their collocation ability. Fourth, no regularity can be found in their errors. This means that English grammar is not fully internalized, so that they answer the questions according to fragmentary knowledge of English and their familiarity with some particular English expressions.