The Use of lovely in Korean English Textbooks: Comparing American and British Corpus

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to discuss the authenticity of English textbooks taught in Korean public schools based on the comparison with American National Corpus and British National Corpus. The center word of the analysis was “lovely” and the research was done by comparing its usage in 3 different corpora. In an effort to find any discrepancies among the three, first, the authors compared the usage of the target word from American National Corpus (ANC) and British National Corpus (BNC). In the course of this analysis, both data were also grouped into written and spoken parts to observe any differences in usage with respect to the mode of the language. Then as the highlight of this research, the results from the two corpora were compared with the English textbooks corpus. From the comparison between the ANC and BNC, it was found that the target word was very often used in both corpora, though there was a difference in the mode which the target was frequently used; the word was commonly found in the written mode of American English, and spoken mode in British English. Moreover, among the different categories of response markers, Context-specific, expressing satisfaction to the listener, was most frequently found especially in British English, spoken mode. When this results were compared with the textbook corpus, it was observed that the target word was less used and taught than it was used in the real-life environment. Moreover, even among the cases where the target word was used, there was no cases found in which it functioned as response markers; it was merely used as what the target was denoted as in common dictionaries. The implication from these results is that considering the differences and changes that English language bears, it should be enhanced that learners of English are given more opportunity to immerse themselves in authentic language usage.