Acculturation and its Effects on Korean Students' Lexical Development

Acculturation and its Effects on Korean Students' Lexical Development

Acculturation refers to the process of becoming adapted to a new culture and a new language in a second language learning within L2 culture. This process enables L2 learners to participate in social-interaction with English native speakers in L2 dominant surroundings and to learn new language forms and meanings. L2 students' acculturation helps them to understand new culture and to develop lexical knowledge. Their lexical knowledge also means that they have word knowledge depending on context. Each word can be interpreted differently by users and contexts, and also it uses diverse contexts causing native speakers and L2 students to communicate efficiently. However, without the lexical knowledge, L2 students surely have problems with interpreting and comprehending US culture-bound words and texts; as a result, they need to be exposed to a target culture openly and to get comprehensible input to develop their cultural and lexical knowledge. Through this study, I wanted to implicate teaching approach about culture and lexical development for Korean EFL students and ESL students. Diverse reading materials commonly read and written by native speakers might be valuable materials to introduce a target culture and word meaning depending on contexts. These materials could be used for meeting teachers and students' academic and practical purposes by learning a target culture and developing lexical knowledge.