언어 간 어휘-개념적 차이가 한국인 영어학습자의 전치사 습득에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The present study aims to explore the effect of cross-linguistic differences in lexico-semantic structure on the acquisition of prepositions by Korean learners of English. Experimental sentences were constructed using English preposition pairs whose members are lexically distinct but not differentiated in Korean (such as during and for). The sentences were presented in two conditions, which varied in terms of whether they contained a correct or incorrect member of a preposition pair. A total of sixty-five adult Korean EFL learners participated in the experiment. They were presented the sentences in a self-paced reading task and then judged their acceptability. A series of t-test were conducted to see if the learners were sensitive to the proper contexts of the prepositions. The results revealed that Korean learners have great difficulty distinguishing the separate contexts for these prepositions. However, the learners were found to gradually differentiate the contexts as their proficiency improved. Further analysis across levels suggested that some preposition pairs are more difficult to distinguish than others. Pedagogical implications are discussed.