Korean EFL Learners’ Development of Inflectional Morphemes

Abstract

This paper examines English inflectional morpheme development among Korean EFL learners. Two groups of children, fourth graders (N=20) and sixth graders (N=19) were given both real-word sentence completion tasks and pseudoword sentence completion tasks. The task materials measuring the students’ knowledge of inflectional morpheme include six types of morphemes (plural -s, regular past -ed, 3rd person singular -s, progressive -ing, comparative -er, and superlative -est). Twenty four sentences (four sentences for each morphology) were created and children were asked to complete the sentences using a given base form of a word. The results indicated that, in learning of the regular past tense -ed, learners using L2 for communication do not seem to override EFL learners accustomed to the function of a written task, and that the grammatical morpheme, which does not exist in Korean L1, has a strong effect on the acquisition. This study concluded that Korean L1 absent morphemes seem to be difficult for Korean English learners to acquire regardless of language learning environments: namely natural language learning and classroom language learning.