한국인 고등학생들의 영어 wh-어 이동과 섬 제약 준수 양상에 관한 연구

A study on acquiring wh-movement and syntactic islands by Korean high school students

In the realm of the grammar of wh-movement and syntactic island constraints, at issue is whether the grammar should be taught in EFL classes explicitly or whether EFL learners simply need exposure to language input. The purpose of this paper is to examine the EFL students’ acquisition status of wh-movement and syntactic island constraints and to seek any further implications on the grammar teaching. Two hundred EFL Korean high school students were investigated on whether they were capable of using long distance (LD) wh-movement while respecting island constraints. Two-clause sentences with no syntactic islands were used to test if the students’ LD movement interpretations were grammatical. The other two-clause sentences with syntactic islands were used to test if they could obey syntactic island constrains while being sensitive to the possible differential effects of argument and adjunct. The results suggest that the students can give long distance interpretations and respect island constraints. All in all, an explicit grammar instruction is recommended to EFL Korean high school students in order for them to fully and quickly acquire the wh-movement rules and island constraints even though they are gradually acquiring the abstract knowledge of wh-movement and syntactic constraints based on Universal Grammar. (198 words)