Capturing the characteristics of Korean high school students at different proficiency levels: Analysis of verb errors in spoken English

• Published in: Journal of the Korea English Education Society Vol. 13; no. 4; pp. 77 - 96
• Main Authors: 김준식, 황필아, Seok-Chae Rhee, Jue-Kyoung Pae
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 한국영어교과교육학회 01.11.2014
• Subjects: 영어와문학
• ISSN: 1598-513X; 2671-6178
• DOI: 10.18649/jkees.2014.13.4.77

This study aims to investigate the characteristics of Korean high school students at four different proficiency levels, by identifying describing verb errors in their spoken English. Apart from frequency-based error analyses, this study scrutinized the error context where a particular rule should or should not apply. 400 written performance of Korean high school learners extracted from a large scale English diagnostic speaking test were compiled into 28,000 words of the English Spoken Corpus of Korean High School Learners (ESCKHSL). The corpus was error-tagged manually by two native speakers of English. The analyses of the corpus suggest the following findings: (i) some error types, such as Verb Omission (VUO), Verb Addition (VUA), Verb Choice (VC), Subject Verb Agreement (VA), and the ‘-ing’ form are frequently found at all the levels; (ii) the use of the ‘-ing’ form can be useful to discriminate between learners at different levels; and (iii) the majority of the learners overgeneralize the SV Agreement rule regardless of their levels, but higher level learners mostly over-apply the rule with the verb ‘to be’. The findings show that error contexts can provide useful information on the characteristics of Korean learners at different levels. A further study on the written performance of the same learners would be useful to understand the language ability of the Korean high school students at different proficiency levels. KCI Citation Count: 1