우리나라 초등학생의 영어 어법 발달 고찰

Korean elementary school students’ development of English grammar: A case study of two children’s descriptive narration

It has been 15 years since we implemented English education in elementary schools in Korea. To figure out how well elementary school students could describe a picture book with no written texts in English, three elementary school students’ spontaneous utterances collected in 2009 were analyzed in Lee(2010). The language informants were two third graders and one sixth grader. As a follow-up study of Lee(2010), two fourth graders’ spontaneous utterances were collected for three months from October to December, 2010. The same procedures of data collection were followed. From the analysis of collected data, we can reach the following conclusion: (ⅰ) the ‘NPSUBJ is + V’ construction was commonly observed in the early data of both informants’ spontaneous utterances; (ⅱ) both informants produced the ‘present progressive’ construction first, and then irregular verbs in past tense and verbs with a 3rd person present morpheme; (ⅲ) the subject-verb agreement rule was not observed; (ⅳ) if a learner produced the 3rd person present morpheme, the plural morpheme in nouns was also observed in her data; and (ⅴ) if a learner had difficulty describing a given scene, she used a set phrase pragmatically appropriate to the scene instead of describing it.