A Corpus Analysis on Korean Pre-serviceEFL Teachers’ Morphology in Use

The present study established a pre-service Korean EFL teacher corpus (KTC) and investigated the teachers’ actual knowledge of using morphologically complex words, in comparison with native English speaker corpora (i.e., the English teacher corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English; ETC and COCA). The AntConc word list analysis results showed that morphologically complex words were more often encountered in the KTC than the ETC and the COCA. Also, specific terms related to education or instruction were more utilized in the teacher corpora (KTC and ETC) than general corpus (COCA). Filter analysis in Excel program provided that the ten most frequent suffixes were -ly, -ion, -ic, -er, -al, -ment, -ive, -ity, -ation, and -ous in order, which was similar to the list of native English speaker corpora (i.e., the Brown Corpus and the Open American National Corpus). However, the use of suffixes (e.g., -ly) in the KTC was less diverse and accurate than the native English speaker corpora. Advanced leveled irregular suffixes (e.g., -ic and -ive) were more often utilized in the KTC, instead of using frequent and regular suffixes (e.g., -y). Based on the results of this study, implications for teacher training and future research ideas were discussed.