A Study on the use of Boosters of International Students’ Persuasive Writing

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the aspects of boosters in Korean persuasive writing written by international students and to identify how these expressions function in discourse. To achieve this goal, existing domestic and foreign studies were reviewed to establish the conceptual framework, scope, and research criteria for booster expressions to be used in this study. Test writing data, which serve as evidence of international students' internalized linguistic expressions, were collected. The composition data were gathered from 40 international students representing China, Japan, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Kyrgyzstan. The research criteria were categorized into adverbs, adjectives/verbs, nouns, periphrastic constructions, endings, cleft sentences, and others. As a result of the study, we found that international students used boosters in the following order of frequency: ‘adverbs > periphrastic constructions > endings > cleft sentences > nouns,’ and that they preferred a strategy that strongly emphasized their thesis using adverbs and syntactic-level periphrastic constructions. Additionally, this study showed that international students attempted to use hedges in conjunction with boosters to moderate the intensity of their opinions as an active strategy within the text. This study is significant because it addresses boosters—a topic that has not been extensively explored in Korean language education research. Furthermore, it examines the actual inter-language proficiency of international students who are not using texts written by Korean authors or texts in controlled situations.