The current study expands on the previous corpus-based study which investigated the use of English articles by adult advanced proficiency Korean EFL learners by comparing a learner corpus and a native speaker corpus. The present paper reports on a follow-up investigation of the Korean EFL learners’ use of English articles: the, a(n), and Ø (the zero or null article) using a young learner corpus, the KNU English Learner Corpus (KELC), and two recently added subcorpora of KNU English as a Foreign Language Corpus (KEFLC), the KNU junior high school learner corpus (KJHSC) and the KNU high school learner corpus (KHSC). Comparison analyses were conducted among the learner corpora consisting of data from different grade level groups of Korean EFL learners and between the learner corpora and the native speaker corpus, COCA. Results show that the high occurrence frequency of the Ø article in the early stages of the article acquisition process is evidence of L1 transfer. Furthermore, the L2 article usage hierarchies found for each of the different grade level learner corpora exhibited overgeneralization of the Ø article or omission or failure to provide articles that resulted in high occurrence frequencies of the Ø article in all grade level learner corpora except the university level KNU Student English Learner Corpus-Written (KSELC-W). The L2 article usage hierarchy for KSELC-W revealed existence of the-flooding. Finally, the findings from the current study indicate that corpus-based studies can provide insight into interlanguage developmental processes and support previous literature with evidence from large data-based investigations.
1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
3. Research Method
4. Results and Discussion
5. Conclusion and Limitations