Korean Students" Perception of English Word Order

Korean Students" Perception of English Word Order

  Koreans learning English have trouble with ordering word pairs in the target language. We surveyed 207 Korean university students to test their ability to order words in English in set phrases. We wanted to see if the word order of the Korean pairs influenced the order given for the English phrases, i.e., if transference and interference occur. The written instrument contained 40 word pairs, half of which have the same order in both languages. The students were asked to choose what they thought was the correct English order. Word pairs included both phrases of adjacent words (e.g., in class) and ones conjoined by and (e.g., East and West). TOEIC scores were provided by 149 students, which were used to test for a correlation between general English level and ability to correctly order pairs. Even students with low TOEIC scores (under 300) correctly ordered almost all items where English order corresponds to Korean, whereas they correctly ordered less than half of the reversed ones. High scorers (700 and over) actually scored slightly less well on the same-order pairs but much better on the reversed order ones. We conjecture that initial transference of the Korean model is over-corrected in a feedback series, moderated by individually learned items.