Korean EFL Learners’ Production and Recognition of Sentences Describing Motion Events

Abstract

This study investigates how differently English L1 speakers and Korean learners of L2 English express motion events and judge the acceptability of various alternative motion constructions. For the implementation of the study, 24 English L1 speakers and 60 Korean college students participated in two experimental tasks. In the first task, the participants were presented with a set of pictures and asked to describe each picture in a sentence. In the subsequent task, they evaluated several lexico-syntactically distinct sentences depicting the same motion event in terms of acceptability. The results show that English L1 speakers prefer to express a motion event with a manner verb followed by a locative prepositional phrase, whereas Korean L1 speakers tend to contain path information in the main verb and denote a change of location using serial verbs. Almost all English L1 speakers judged the structure of [Path V + PP + (by) Manner V-ing] to be unacceptable. In contrast, most Korean speakers considered it as natural. There was no significant effect of proficiency on the L2 speakers’ acceptability judgement, suggesting that the cross-linguistic variation in verbalizing motion events brings about learnability problems.