과거 사태 지시 표현 유무에 따른 중국인 한국어 학습자의 과거시제 사용

A Study on L2 Korean Past Tense Use in Past Indicating Contexts by L1 Chinese Speakers

This study investigated the effects of past event indicating expressions on L2 Korean past tense morpheme usage by Chinese learners of Korean. The Korean language, which is agglutinative, indicates past events with the morpheme ‘-eott-’, while the Chinese language is aided by vocabulary that refers to events in the past without needing a past tense morpheme. We examined whether Chinese learners of Korean use the Korean past tense morpheme differently (1) when they have past-event indicating expressions in the sentence and (2) when their Korean proficiency differs. The participants of the study were 91 intermediate and advanced L2 Korean learners from Chinese universities. A cloze test with 9 sentences was conducted to assess participants’ use of Korean past tense. The results showed that the Chinese learners of Korean used the past tense morpheme better when they have past event indicating expressions. The advanced group used the past tense morphemes better than the lower group, and they used the past tense morphemes better with or without the past event indicating expressions. These results confirm that when there is a past event indicating expression, it facilitates the L2 learners’ recognition of past events and leads them to use past tense morpheme. These findings show that explicit instructions with time and place expressions can help Chinese learners of Korean to use past tense morphemes.