초급, 중급, 고급 과정에 나타나는 한국어 학습자의 어말 어미 사용 실태 연구

An Investigation into the Use of Korean Final Endings by Adult Foreign Learners of Korean of all levels

Korean endings are grammatical elements which are to be used by learners from the early stage and are difficult to use properly even in the advanced level. For this reason, the ability to use Korean endings properly is required by the learners to complete sentences and also to form more than sentences. This study aims to investigate the use of Korean final endings by observing the patterns of different kinds of them used by adult foreign learners of Korean of all levels. For this purpose, learners' language, from interviews, role-plays, presentations and discussions, was collected and transcribed. The types of sentence endings and connective endings significantly increase at the intermediate level. As they move onto the advanced level of proficiency, they use various kinds of sentence endings performing pragmatic functions such as half talk, exclamation, soliloquy, confirmation. Learners' use of connective endings shows their sentence construction strategies, that is they connect sentences in order to make sentences longer and to continue the utterance without disturbing in spite of their lack of knowledge of korean endings by using certain several endings which they prefer or by avoiding using endings after stems. Most of the adnominal endings are acquired during the elementary level but most students make errors using them correctly until they reach advanced level.