English Connective so in Korean EFL Students’ Writing

Abstract

So is a frequently used word in English with multiple functions and meanings. The purpose of the current study is to examine the use of English connective so in Korean EFL students’ essay writing from the perspective of pragmatics. This study is particularly interested in investigating the way Korean students develop the discoursal use of so, which has become an issue in studies of second language acquisition (Trillo 2002). The central research questions are in what sentence structures and context students employ so and what semantic and pragmatic meanings and functions it manifests when it occurred in a text. In tackling these matters, the study analyzes the data collected from the essay writings of first-year English students in a Korean university. The assumptions based on the previous corpus-based studies are that Korean students may not be used to encoding so with its pragmatic use, and that the overuse and inappropriate use of so in Korean students’ essay writings may be due to their unawareness of the stylistic differences between spoken and written English and the influence of EFL teaching materials.