Development of a Korean Child Learner’s English Grammar: Evidence from Her Narrative Description

The purpose of this study is to show how a Korean child learner of English develops her English grammar. The language informant, Ara, was a 5th grader in 2011 and she participated in a wordless picture book description task for two years. Her description was recorded onto a digital voice recorder from September to December both in 2011 and 2012, once a month, four times per year. The following are the findings: (i) Ara showed a developmental progress when she described Picture Book A. The vocabulary she used in 2012 became consistent and was grammaticalized; (ii) The usage of her NPs became quite consistent and was stabilized as language sampling sessions progressed, although there were some errors made in the usage of Determiners; (iii) The occurrences of ill-formed VPs lessened by 50% in 2012: from an average of 5 tokens (3, 6, 6, and 5 tokens in each session) to an average of 2.5 tokens (1, 3, 2, and 4 tokens in each session). It can be concluded that Ara’s English grammar remarkably enhanced; (iv) Ara’s ditransitive verb constructions were in the process of stabilization and she acquired the structures with an S-V-DO-IO word order earlier than those with an S-V-IO-DO word order; (v) Ara showed some difficulties in the usage of the expletive subject, it or there; (vi) It seems that Ara understood the concept of Passive voice, although she did not use the expected Passive constructions in the sentence completion task.