EFL Learners

EFL Learners

This study deals with a functional analysis of the English passive voice in the Korean EFL university setting. The main purpose of the paper is to examine how learners use the English passive in a pragmatic perspective, with particular attention to the role of language transfer. To this end, a large amount of data was collected from 200 university students on the basis of an argumentative essay writing task. It was shown that emotional functional errors were more predominant than discourse functional errors, which suggested that language transfer occurred. Language transfer had explanatory power to account for the emotional functional errors. Discourse functional errors were largely due to learners' misconceptions concerning discourse competence. Of particular interest from the results is that there exists a hierarchy of acceptability of discourse functional errors, which suggests that we have to allow for degrees of pragmatic naturalness at the expense of a binary distinction. A major significance of this study is its demonstration of the importance of the interplay between grammar and pragmatics, bridging the gap between the two fields in second language acquisition.