A Corpus-Based Investigation on the Use of Resultive Connectives between Korean & Chinese EFL Learners

Resultive connectives (hereafter RCs) is one of the most frequently used categories of logical connectives in English. The present research attempts to reveal how computerized corpus-based contrastive analysis using learner corpora can shed light on a better understanding of the nature and scope of RCs used by the Korean and the Chinese college students. This study first compared the grammatical and lexical usage of RCs in a Chinese and a Korean EFL learners corpus to that of a native English speakers corpus. In particular, a contrastive inter-language analysis approach was adopted by focusing on the overall frequency and the usage of RCs. Results show that although the Korean and the Chinese students had a rather similar repertoire of RCs to that of the native speakers, they generally tended to have frequency and positioning problems. The discrepancies existing across the corpora show that most EFL students have difficulties in learning RCs due to not only inter-lingual or intra-lingual differences, but also their incomplete knowledge on the lexical, syntactical, and register style-related information on RCs. Cases of misuse are discussed as well to illustrate the possible causes of such problems in writing, through which reliable linguistic statistics could be generated and used to aid linguistic judgments. Finally, methodological and pedagogical implications for teaching writing and materials development are discussed.