코퍼스 기반 한국 대학생의 어휘적 연어 능력 연구

A Corpus-based Study of Korean College Learners Ability of English Lexical Collocation

This study is aimed to investigate Korean college learners ability of English Lexical collocation. The subjects were a total of 102 university students majored in English education. Four English verbs: seek, throw, treat, take, nouns: ability, change, family, care, and adjectives: boring, popular, qualified and different were selected and tested. The results were as follows. First, the average score was 64.66%. Second, the subjects general English competence(TOEIC scores) correlated significantly with their collocation knowledge. Third, Korean college learners have the most difficulty answering correctly adverb+adjective types of collocation. Compared with other types of collocation, adverb+adjective type was the lowest. Fourth, when compared with the mean scores of lexical collocation within the each group based on their TOEIC scores, there was a significant correlation between the advanced group and the low group. Fifth, the subjects did not compare correctly the difference of use among synonyms such as seek/find, teat/cure/heal, and increasing/gradually, etc. Finally, t-scores of corpus regarding each collocation type did not correlate with the score of each question. From the above results, the main reason of the errors in terms of choosing correct lexis is probably due to their method of studying vocabulary, which is just memorizing vocabulary without understanding their actual use in authentic context. Thus, corpora will serve as a meaningful reference for language learners providing them with common usage and collocation patterns. More importantly, corpus use will have immediate effect by helping them to solve immediate language problems by promoting their perceptions of language awareness. At the same time, more systematic vocabulary teaching methodology and related textbooks should be developed to improve the collocation ability of Korean English learners.