베트남 이주노동자 가정 자녀와 한국 가정 아동의 이야기 만들기에 나타난 통사적 숙달도 비교 연구

A Comparative Study on the Syntactic Proficiency Shown in the Story Generation of Children of Vietnamese Migrant Workers' Families and Korean Children: Focused on nine-year-old children

This study aims to examine what differences in Korean proficiency there are between school-age children of ordinary Korean families and Vietnamese migrant workers' families. To gather data needed for this study, one Korean researcher and one Vietnamese researcher recorded the story telling of three nine-year-old Korean children and three children of Vietnamese migrant workers' families respectively. ‘Frog, Where are you? (Mayer, 1969)’ was used as a story generation tool for this study. At the data analysis stage, three researchers discussed analysis tools together for three times. They analyzed transfer data independently and then discussed them together to generate common analysis outcome by correcting errors or mistakes in the analysis. To measure the syntactic proficiency of children's story telling, this study employed an analysis frame consisting of structural complexity (number of words, number of phrases, types of phrases, number of morphemes), sentence expansion (connective ending, transforming ending), discourse cohesion (conjunctive adverbs, deictic substitute) and syntactic accuracy. The outcome of this study is as follows. First, in terms of structural complexity, children of Vietnamese migrant workers' families showed lower level than Korean children in all areas. Second, Korean children showed more connective ending errors in terms of type and number than Vietnamese children. Third, no clear distinction was observed between the two groups in the use of conjunctive adverbs regarding discourse cohesion. However, deictic substitutes were more often and diversely used by Korean children than Vietnamese children. Lastly, as for syntactic accuracy, children of Vietnamese migrant workers' families had difficulties in using quotation sentences, causative sentences and deictic substitutes. Some Korean children, however, also showed similar errors. This study examined individual story generation in the same context by setting story telling as examination tool. This has significance in the point that it can provide contextualized, individualized information of story generation of children of migrant workers' families to researchers working in the child language research.