271 English Teaching, Vol. 67, No.2, Summer 2012 English Verb Use in Korean College Students' Essays: A Corpus-based Study * Hyonjin Cho (Sogang University) Isaiah WonHo Yoo (Sogang University)** Cho, Hyonjin, & Yoo, Isaiah WonHo. (2012). English verb use in Korean college students' essays: A corpus-based study. English Teaching, 67(2),271-289. This study investigates the types and frequencies of verb errors in Korean college students' essays in order to ascertain what aspects of English verb use Korean learners find most troublesome. The data used in this study were retrieved from a learner corpus consisting of essays written by 399 students who major in humanities at a university in Seoul. The 686 verb errors found in the corpus were classified into the following four major categories: (a) omission of necessary items in a verb phrase, (b) addition of unnecessary items in a verb phrase, (c) misformation ofa verb phrase, and (d) misordering of items in a verb phrase. A careful examination of these 686 verb errors has revealed that misformation is the most common form of error, accounting for over 60% of all the errors. A sub-category of misformation errors, agreement errors in turn accounted for more than half of all the 4 I 6 misformation errors (216 tokens), a number bigger than any of the other three categories of error types, i.e. omission (175 tokens), addition (72 tokens), and misordering (23 tokens). This finding might have resulted from negative influence from the students' L I, as Korean verbs do not conjugate according to grammatical person. Another noteworthy finding is the fact that the students made a great number of errors with both the lexical and the auxiliary uses of be and have. Considering that both uses of these two verbs are taught early on in Korea, this finding suggests that Korean students need to be continually provided with contexts in which they can practice different uses of be and have. * This work was supported by the Sogang University Research Grant of 20 II (20 I 110008) . •• 1st author: Hyonjin Cho; Cor responding author: Isaiah WonHo Yoo
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271
English Teaching, Vol. 67, No.2, Summer 2012
English Verb Use in Korean College Students' Essays: A Corpus-based Study *
Hyonjin Cho
(Sogang University)
Isaiah WonHo Yoo
(Sogang University)**
Cho, Hyonjin, & Yoo, Isaiah WonHo. (2012). English verb use in Korean college
students' essays: A corpus-based study. English Teaching, 67(2),271-289.
This study investigates the types and frequencies of verb errors in Korean college
students' essays in order to ascertain what aspects of English verb use Korean
learners find most troublesome. The data used in this study were retrieved from a
learner corpus consisting of essays written by 399 students who major in humanities
at a university in Seoul. The 686 verb errors found in the corpus were classified into
the following four major categories: (a) omission of necessary items in a verb phrase,
(b) addition of unnecessary items in a verb phrase, (c) misformation ofa verb phrase,
and (d) misordering of items in a verb phrase. A careful examination of these 686
verb errors has revealed that misformation is the most common form of error,
accounting for over 60% of all the errors. A sub-category of misformation errors,
agreement errors in turn accounted for more than half of all the 4 I 6 misformation
errors (216 tokens), a number bigger than any of the other three categories of error
types, i.e. omission (175 tokens), addition (72 tokens), and misordering (23 tokens) .
This finding might have resulted from negative influence from the students' L I , as
Korean verbs do not conjugate according to grammatical person. Another
noteworthy finding is the fact that the students made a great number of errors with
both the lexical and the auxiliary uses of be and have. Considering that both uses of
these two verbs are taught early on in Korea, this finding suggests that Korean
students need to be continually provided with contexts in which they can practice
different uses of be and have.
* This work was supported by the Sogang University Research Grant of 20 II (20 I 110008) . •• 1st author: Hyonjin Cho; Corresponding author: Isaiah WonHo Yoo
272 Cho, Hyonjin, & Yoo, Isaiah WonHo
I. INTRODUCTION
The English verb contains a variety of complex characteristics and functions, and
there are significant differences between the verb system of English and that of Korean.
Examples of such differences include (a) the presence of inflection according to person
and number in English verbs, as opposed to the absence of such features in Korean verbs,
and (b) the stricter distinction in the tense and aspect system of English verbs, compared
to that of Korean verbs.
Due to such complexity of the English verb system, many learners of English as a
Second or Foreign Language commit errors related to verbs frequently. Many existing
studies have examined English verb errors committed by learners from several different
angles. Franck, VigJiocco, and Nicol (2002) and Kaan (2002) investigated subject-verb
agreement errors, both pointing out linear distance as a possible cause for such errors.
Incorrect orderings and subject-object asymmetry in verb phrases were dealt by White
(1990/1991) and Lee (2009), respectively. Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982), on the other
hand, presented a more detailed analysis on verb errors by providing examples of verb
omission, misuse of tense, and subject-verb agreement errors.
What lacks in all these studies, however, is the analysis of the specific areas of
English verb use with which learners struggle most. Consider the following example,
retrieved from a learner corpus consisting of English essays written by Korean college
students:
(1) If traffic is in awful situation, we get upset and *lost out valuable time. For
example when we go out with our car for an appointment and got stuck in traffic
jam we feel annoyed and that feeling *(is) going to affect their original
appointment.
This example contains errors of incorrect tense use and the omission of a necessary
item in a verb phrase. More specifically, the past tense form of the verb lose is not
consistent with the preceding verb phrase get upset, which is used in present tense, and
the verb be is omitted in the periphrastic modal be going to. Consider also the following
two examples:
(2) Also, many people want to live *(in) a comfortable place. If this moving
*continue, small towns will *be become empty.
(3) But if I get more time to think what I like to learn and *who am I, reading more
books is more important than earning to get spec.
English Verb Use in Korean College Students ' Essays: A Corpus-based Study 273
In (2), the preposition in is missing after the verb live. The second sentence also
contains two errors : (a) the subject-verb disagreement between this moving and continue
and (b) the addition of the unnecessary verb be between will and become. In (3), on the
other hand, the subject-auxiliary inversion in who am J is unnecessary because the
clause should be an indirect wh-question.
Most of the students who wrote the essays in which these errors were detected have
achieved nearly perfect scores in the English section of the Korean Scholastic Aptitude
Test (KSAT), a fact which implies that they had mostly mastered the grammatical items
taught throughout primary and secondary education. However, the verb errors related to
the most basic use seen above indicate that the students may not be able to transfer their
grammatical knowledge into actual language production. By ascertaining what aspects
of the English verb Korean college students have the most difficulty with, we can come
to a better understanding of which English verb use Korean students need more
instructions and practice of. Thus, this study aims to investigate the types and
frequencies of Korean learners ' verb errors in their essays. Findings of such a study can
help English teachers prioritize items related to verb use when they teach students or
have students practice various forms of the English verb.
II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
1. The English Verb
Many of the current publications provide plenty of insight into verbs. Aarts (2008, p.
33) introduces verbs as "action words" and explicates the various syntactic
argumentations of the verb with appropriate examples. Carter and McCarthy (2006) and
Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik (1985) provide detailed explanations about the
various features of the verb: verb classes (e.g. transitivity, stative, and dynamic),
functions (e.g. tense, aspect, voice, and mood), multiword verbs (e.g. phrasal verbs and
prepositional verbs), and verb forms (e.g. infinitive and inflection).
Huddleston and Pullum (2002) also provide an in-depth analysis of the English verb,
including clarifications of some controversial issues regarding certain verb rules- for
instance, the accurate tense category of the modal verb will. Biber, Johansson, Leech,
Comad, and Finegan (1999), on the other hand, present corpus-based findings on the
distribution of types of verbs in various contexts. Finally, Celce-Murcia and Larsen
Freeman (1999), Cowan (2008), and Parrott (2010) provide teachers of the English
language with helpful guidelines for teaching the complex English verb system. Parrott
(2010), for instance, devotes separate sections in the book to point out several features
274 Cho, Hyonjin, & Yoo, Isaiah WonHo
of the English verb, with corresponding examples of learners ' errors, that are
particularly difficult for learners to acquire, e.g. (a) the use of auxiliary verbs, (b)
various verb forms used for tense, number, person, negation, or question formation, and
(c) different rules depending on such characteristics of verbs as transitivity and
dynamicity.
2. Previous Studies on Verb Errors
As the verb is a mandatory component in sentence fonnation, it is important to be
concerned with the errors of verb use when studying learners' grammatical errors in
language production. As briefly mentioned in the introduction, a number of studies have
analyzed verb errors committed by English learners with diverse language backgrounds.
Franck, Vigliocco, and Nicol (2002) focus on subject-verb agreement errors in
sentence production, relating the issue to the linear distance hypothesis, the distance
between the subject head noun and the verb. The hypothesis suggests that learners tend
to have more difficulty with subject-verb agreement when there are more intervening
elements between the subject head noun and the verb. Kaan (2002) also points out the
linear distance as an important factor for learners ' subject-verb agreement errors, further
arguing that "the presence of an intervening noun phrase with interfering number
feature" is another factor contributing to learners' committing subject-verb agreement
errors (p. 165). The study has found that subject-verb agreement errors tend to be more
frequent when a plural noun separates the singular subject head noun and the verb.
White (1990, 1991), on the other hand, examines learners ' errors by relating them to
the influence of the learners' first language (LI), i.e. French. White points out the
difference in negative placement in English and French as the reason for ungrammatical
sentences such as Mary *likes not John.
Using Dulay, Burt, and Krashen's (1982) classification of learners' errors in general
language production, Yu and Yoo (2010) examine the erroneous uses of prepositional
verbs committed by Korean university students. They discuss four main categories of