캄보디아인 한국어 학습자의 시제 습득 연구

A Study on Acquisition of Korean tenses by Cambodian Korean Learners

The aim of this study was to see the acquisition of Korean tenses among 90 Cambodian Korean learners. In Korean, time is represented through tense morphemes, whereas in Cambodian, an isolating language, certain vocabulary represents the time. Therefore, Cambodian Korean learners may have difficulties learning tense morphemes as the two languages have little morphological similarity. Especially, Cambodian learners can have struggles understanding deictic projections where the items are interpreted differently according to the discourse context. By separating the Korean tenses whose basic meanings coincide with the actual time referred by their tense morphemes and those that do not, the study examined the learners’ acquisition of tenses. For this purpose, we have three following research questions; a) Do Cambodian Korean learners show different levels of tense acquisition according to their levels of proficiency?; b) Is there a correlation between the acquisitions of tenses according to their types (i.e. whether their basic meanings and the actual time referred to are the same or not)?; c) With which type do the learners have most difficulties in acquiring? For the research question a), we put the learners into two different groups by their TOPIK scores, and ran a t-test for independent samples. For question b), we computed the Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient for each type of items, and for c), we examined the level of acquisition by types, using the mean value of each item. Results showed that the level of proficiency does not affect the acquisition of tenses significantly. Moreover, the correlation between the acquisitions of tenses according to their types appeared to be very weak. This suggests that acquiring the basic meanings of tenses does not imply the acquisition of variable tense items according to their contexts of discourse. Especially, the most challenging appeared to be the type where the present tense refers to the past or vice versa. However, the level of understanding for the present tense referring to the future was exceptionally high, as it has be explicitly taught in class. This suggests the impact of explicitly teaching the items that are interpreted from the context of discourse. Therefore, the pragmatic items should be taught more explicitly.