The study investigates whether different English learning contexts result in different grammar development in learners’ shared mother tongue, Korean. The research instrument included a sentence completion task of collocational expressions in Korean dialogues, a multiple-choice test of grammar in Korean sentences and dialogues, and a sentence composition task using double nominative structures. The participants were 26 students at the age of 8 to 9 year old in the EFL context, 21 in a type of immersion program, and 19 in the ESL context. The results showed little difference among the three groups in the collocation sentence completion task and the multiple-choice test, but a clearly significant difference between the EFL students and the ESL students in the double nominative sentence composition task. The students who had been learning English in English culture showed more limited knowledge in the writing sentences with such peculiar but common structures in Korean language, compared with those who had been learning English in a Korean cultural context. In the complementary correlation analysis of the scores in the sentence composition task with a double nominative structure, the length of residence in Korea proved the strongest correlation, implying that the longer students live in Korea, the better they perform. The study provides the pedagogical implication that the curriculum of a mother tongue for bilingual learners could need to intervene with more emphasis on enhancing learners’ grammatical development, including language-specific structures.

Motivated by the fact that English spelling c has two different pronunciations [k] and [s], this study investigates the relationship between English orthography c and its pronunciations as reflected in the c-spelled word production by Korean secondary school students. A total of 15 secondary school students produced the stimulus words designed for this study. The study revealed that the students had difficulties in associating the spelling c with the target-appropriate pronunciations because the overall inaccuracy rate amounted to 14.9% in the pretest. Further, the error rates in the pretest were different depending on the word groups; 33.3% for the c+i words, 20.2% for the c+e words, and 14.4% for the final c words. The most predominant error type was the replacement of the target sound [s] with [k], which occurred in the word groups of c+e and c+i. After two sessions of pronunciation training on the c-spelled words, the students showed a significant improvement in producing target words, and thus the overall inaccuracy rates were reduced to 5.5%. Likewise, the error rates for the word groups of c+i, c+e, and final c were significantly decreased to 12.7%, 7.6%, and 6.2%, respectively in the posttest 2. The results were further analyzed in terms of individual lexical items and individual participants and showed different learning processes depending on the lexical items and participants. Based on the findings of the study, implications for pronunciation teaching were drawn.