A Corpus-based investigation into Korean Learners' spoken vocabulary use

Abstract

Despite the importance of spoken vocabulary use to improve spoken skills, little has been conducted to describe spoken features of Korean learners. The purpose of this study is to investigate spoken vocabulary use of Korean learners and find out how far they deviate from native speaker norms. For this purpose, 40 Korean college students` spoken interaction data are transcribed and analysed. Using Wordsmith tool with 17,436 words, frequent single words category (modal items, delexical verbs, interactive words, and discourse markers) and frequent multi-words clusters (discourse markers, vagueness & approximation, politeness & face, and hedgeing) are compared with the spoken British National Corpus (BNC). Frequency analysis revealed that among 56 lexical items investigated, 34 items were underused and 17 items are not represented in KLC. It is evident that Korean learners used limited variety and range in those spoken vocabulary use. Based on this result, some suggestions are made to improve Korean learners` spoken vocabulary teaching and learning.