The present study conducted a comparative analysis of use of evaluative adjectives in the essays of Korean EFL learners and native speakers of English. It discussed the characteristics of different types of evaluative adjectives, e.g., frequency, semantic categories, and collocational value of evaluative adjectives. The result of the frequency analysis demonstrates Korean EFL learners’ significant overuse of the limited types of the target items. The analysis of evaluative adjectives by semantic categories shows the similar tendency. For example, the repeated use of a small number of assessment adjectives resulted in the high frequency of adjectives in the assessment category. The present study also demonstrates the collocational associations between the selected evaluative adjectives and intensifiers in the corpus. The descriptive results of the analysis of collocational information indicate that learners employed a less formal/spoken style in the written corpus. As Blagoeva (2004) noted, the differences between the Korean EFL learners and native speakers of English in the characteristics of evaluative expressions might not directly obstruct communication but it is an indication that there is still much to be done in the development of second/foreign language skills.

Vocabulary expansion is essential for learners to gain proficiency in L2, but learners’ lexical knowledge has not drawn much research attention in SLA (Howarth, 1996). In an attempt to throw light on a neglected aspect of learners’ competence, this paper investigates the use of a lexical item in the writing corpora. In particular, it compares the frequency and distribution of intensifiers in the EFL corpus with those in a native English corpus. The result of the frequency analysis in the EFL corpus offers an evidence of significant overuse of the limited types of maximizers and boosters, which in turn result in the inflated frequency of intensifiers. Further, the present study uses the mutual information score to measure the strength of the bond between selected intensifiers and adjacent lexical items. The result does not clearly demonstrate associations between the intensifier and the adjacent words due to the small corpus size, but it provides some possible pedagogical implications for L2 teaching. The frequency information rather than the information on the strength of associations between intensifiers and adjacent words, for example, would be more helpful to EFL learners.