A Corpus-Based Study on the Expression of Past Time Events in Korean ESL Learners

A Corpus-Based Study on the Expression of Past Time Events in Korean ESL Learners

The present study compiles an ESL learner corpus over a period of one year in an attempt to provide a systematic analysis of learners' interlanguage. In particular, it investigates how ESL learners' devices of expressing past time events are developed in the context of both spoken and written discourse. The analysis of the corpus reveals that even though the learners have limited morpho-syntactic devices in the early stages of language acquisition, they efficiently used the discourse structure of the topic to express past time events. Further, the learners showed a sustained use of discourse pragmatic means (e.g., adverbs) to compensate for their limited morpho-syntactic devices. The learners' corpus reveals a disproportionate distribution in oral and written genres in the use of regular past forms, which seems to stem from pronunciation difficulties due to the learners' L1 phonological structure.