Korean EFL Learners’ Underuse of the English Perfect: A Collostructional Analysis of Written Learner Corpora

Abstract

This study examines whether and how Korean EFL learners underuse verbal lexemes as the English perfect using a series of corpus-based methods involving two written learner corpora, which amount to 3,590,194 words in total. It is difficult to detect which forms are significantly underused by language learners because the underused patterns are such that the learners avoid producing them in the data and are therefore less visible, unlike the overused patterns. Accordingly, the current work performs collostructional analysis to measure the association strength between the perfect construction and the specific verbal lexemes, thereby demonstrating that collostructional analysis works effectively to reveal the underused patterns in the language learners’ data. The collostructional analysis reveals that 416 verbal lexemes were underused while only 4 verbal lexemes were overused. It is proposed that this underuse behavior of Korean EFL learners might result from the lack of grammatical markers for the perfect in Korean and the use of temporal adverbials. Along this line of research, this paper proposes the effectiveness of collostructional analysis in measuring associations and potential pedagogical implications.