Adult Korean EFL Learners’ Pronoun Interpretation in Discourse Context

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Abstract

The current research examined whether Korean advanced EFL learners understand pronouns in the same manner as native speakers of English do. Korean college students were asked to read 4-sentence stories and to rate how much the last sentence made sense related to the previous sentences. The stories differed on (1) whether the subject of the last sentence continued the subject of the previous sentences and (2) whether the subject was mentioned as a pronoun. The results showed that Korean EFL learners showed similar patterns of linguistic intuition to those of native English speakers, preferring pronouns for continued subjects and nouns for shifted subjects. The implication of this study lies on applying the discourse comprehension of native speakers from previous studies to EFL learners’, and on building the basis for on-line measures such as eye-tracking or reaction-time methods to discover the development of linguistic intuition of EFL learners.

Comments

This article was originally published in Journal of Language Sciences, volume 22, issue 3, in 2015.

This article is in Korean.

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