The purposes of this study are to understand the influence of L1 on learning Korean negation and a developmental sequence of Korean negation forms through examining English and Japanese learners of Korean. In particular, we aim to investigate whether linguistic distance between L1 and L2 affects learning Korean negation. Forty English and twenty Japanese students who were learning Korean in colleges participated in the written production test. As a control group, forty Korean native speakers took the written test. We observed that the English and the Japanese groups produced less number of long form negation sentences than the Korean adult group did. The English group showed a developmental pattern to advance from short to long forms, while the Japanese group demonstrated the opposite tendency. These results suggested that an influence of L1 negation structure on L2 learning coexisted with that of a general developmental sequence. The pedagogical implications of the findings are two-fold:1) the findings would provide practical suggestions for instructing Korean negation forms in multilingual classrooms and 2) the findings would help researchers and language teachers understand the learning patterns of Korean by L2 learners.

The present study investigates the collocations of the first person plural possessive pronoun in order to identify L1 influence in Korean EFL learners' writing, in comparison with native English speakers’ writing. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, this learner corpus research focuses on the use of the first person pronoun OUR in English, which seems to be negatively transferred by somewhat peculiar usages of the Korean equivalent pronoun wuli. The contrastive interlanguage analysis first shows that Korean learners significantly overuse first person plural pronouns whereas they significantly underuse first person singular pronouns, compared to native English speakers. Second, it also indicates that the distribution of frequencies of the ‘OUR + noun’ collocations according to a classification based on the Sejong Corpus seems very similar in both corpora, and that the frequencies are likely to be dependent upon specific individual collocates. Third, Korean learners appear to particularly overuse six specific ‘OUR + noun’ collocations rather than ‘MY + noun’ collocations, which can be argued to be empirical evidence of L1 influence. The findings of the present study are expected to provide valuable implications to English language teaching in classroom in Korea.