Avoidance Phenomena of English Tag Questions by Korean Learners of English

Avoidance Phenomena of English Tag Questions by Korean Learners of English

This study investigates the avoidance phenomena of English tag questions by Korean learners of English. The avoidance of tag questions by L2 learners of English is often explained either in terms of grammatical complexity between L1 and L2 (Dagut & Laufer. 1985) or semantic consideration (Hulstijin & Marchena, 1989). The basic assumption underlying this study is that Korean learners of English resort to an avoidance strategy to cope with the difficulties they encounter when they express themselves in English. The following questions are addressed in this study: (1) To what extent do Korean learners of English avoid using tag questions?; and (2) If they tend to avoid using tag questions, how can these phenomena be explained? To answer the above questions, this study has analyzed and compared the performance of three different groups of Korean subjects and a group of native speakers of English with regard to their usage of tag questions. It suggests the relevance of avoidance behavior not only to theory construction, but also to applications in the field of SLA.