Relative Strength of Influence of Five Factors Involved in Korean Learners’ Choice of English Ditransitive Constructions

This study aims to examine the relative strength of influence of the five factors that are known to be involved in Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ choice between the two English ditransitive constructions. The five factors include animacy of theme (T), definiteness of T, pronominality of recipient (R), length difference between T and R, and semantic class of individual verb. In order to explore how differently the five factors influence Korean EFL learners’ choice between the adpositional construction (AC) and the double object construction (DC), the study used the Korean section of the TOEFL 11 corpus and conducted three correlation tests: ϕ, V, and rpbis. From the results, the following were observed: (1) the length difference between R and T had the strongest effect on the Korean EFL learners’ choice between AC and DC and (2) the relative strength of influence of the five factors examined in the Korean data set was different from those examined in a native English speaker data set. The study ends with a discussion of pedagogical implications of the findings.