The knowledge of spelling cannot be earned by learning the relations between the sounds and graphemes. However, this study shows that the learners' knowledge is not a mere result of simple memorization. The current study found that the learners’ spelling knowledge is interwoven with their established phonemic inventory and their imperfect knowledge of the target language spelling. Using a learner corpus (KNU English Learner Corpus) constructed from young learners, primary school grades from 4 to 6, enrolled in a gifted English program, we extracted and examined 125 erroneously spelled words each from the basic level and the advanced level subcorpus. Building on Justicia et al. (1999), the error data were classified into six categories and an additional category of morpheme error (MOR) with substitution and omission errors accounting for 76.3% of the total errors. Conducting further analysis, we were able to identify typical cases of the errors and the underlying causes inducing the errors. Generally speaking, the substitution error is found to be due to the variability between grapheme and sound whereas the omission error is often caused by the learners’ tendency to prefer simpler graphemephoneme relations. There also exists considerable intervention of the learners' Korean phonemic inventory, particularly in lower level learners. The findings from this study can be used to provide various specific guides for effective spelling instruction and help learners become more confident about their writing.

The present study investigates usage of English futures, will and be going to, by Korean EFL learners and American native English speakers. The examined usage data are extracted from the native speaker corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and two learner corpora, the Kyungpook National University (KNU) Student English Learner Corpus-Written (KSELC-W) and the KNU English Learner Corpus (KELC), and compared to determine interlanguage developmental patterns and usage similarities or differences between native speakers and nonnative speakers. In support of existing literature, the findings from the current study reveal that the American native English speakers of COCA significantly overuse both will and be going to in the spoken register compared to the combined written registers. Furthermore, the findings also indicate that although the writing samples of the learner corpora were written during formal EFL education settings, will and be going to usage by the Korean EFL learners closely resemble the usage data of the combined written-all registers of COCA. Finally, semantic analyses show that the advanced learners of KSELC-W use be going to quite correctly with the semantic senses in the present form. In contrast to the learners in Coates (1983), they use be going to to deliver the sense of epistemicity rather than the root intention senses.

The present study investigates the semantics involved in the L2 English article use by Korean EFL learners. The examined usage data were extracted from the researcher compiled learner corpus, the Kyungpook National University Student English Learner Corpus-Writing (KSELC-W). The importance of current research is in the fact that the investigated data was not collected through formal elicitation tasks or grammar focused activities. Therefore, the learner corpus data represent Korean EFL learners' unconscious knowledge of the English article system and their performance on timed writing sessions which did not focus on grammar. The findings reveal that Korean EFL learners do not make random misuse or overuse errors in production of English articles the and a(n) and that the patterns are in accordance with the Fluctuation Hypothesis. Additionally, results show that the semantic feature specificity effects the Korean EFL learners in the current study and provide supporting data for direct UG access underlying article choice. These results support previously reported findings by Ionin et. al. (2004, 2009) and Ko et al. (2009).

The present study examined the effects of gender and grade level on English reading comprehension proficiency of young Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Learners. Through a nationwide reading comprehension assessment event, nine hundred seventy-nine young Korean EFL learners in Korean elementary school grades 1 through 6 were tested for their English reading comprehension measures. Statical analysis was conducted to investigate between and within group differences as well as possible interactional effect of gender and grade level. Results showed significant main effects of gender and grade level on reading comprehension. However, there was no interactional effect of gender and grade level on English reading comprehension of the young Korean EFL learners.