Errors with be, whether whether whether whether whether whether whether whether omission omission omission omission omission omission omission omission (e.g., John happy) or overuse (i.e., be-insertion; e.g., John is love Mary), have received particular attention in L2 acquisition studies exploring L1 transfer. This study investigates such errors in the context of L3 acquisition, focusing on L1 transfer. L1-Chinese (n = 34) and L1-Russian (n = 34) children with L2 Korean completed an elicitation production task designed to explore their use of English be. The study resulted in two main findings. First, L1-Russian children showed more omission errors than proficiency-matching L1-Chinese children, possibly due to an L1 transfer given that copula in Russian are dropped in the present tense. Second, L1-Chinese learners used be-insertion more frequently than proficiency-matching L1-Russian children, possibly due to using be for more functions (as a topic marker and an inflectional morpheme), as other research has shown for L2-English learners with topic-prominent L1s. Based on the findings, the study discusses some pedagogical implications.

This study investigated the use of L1(English) by L2(Korean) learners’ interaction with their native-speaking conversation partners from a sociocultural perspective, using the lens of conversation analysis. The data included 64 hours of recorded interactions of 16 conversation pairs of nonnative learners of Korean and their native conversation partners as well as learners’ diary entries. Findings gleaned from qualitative analysis of learners’ use of their L1 (i.e., English) during native-nonnative pair interactions outside the classroom showed that the overall use of L1 by L2 learners found to be facilitative of their L2 learning. The results proposed a model of L2 learners interaction with their conversation partners that attempted to link learner’s use of L1 and their L2 proficiency, and concluded that learners’ interactions played a key role in improving L2 learners’ language proficiency. In addition, pedagogical recommendations based on the research findings were proposed.

This corpus-driven longitudinal study investigates the structural use of lexical bundles in published research article (RA) introductions in applied linguistics written by English experts and Korean graduate students across two different levels of study. Frequency-based bundles were retrieved from a corpus of 200 published RA introductions and two corpora of 46 and 49 introductions of term papers written at two time points of the first and fourth semester of graduate course. In a further step, the structures of the bundles in different rhetorical moves of RA introductions were analyzed to reveal the developmental patterns in bundle use. The analyses show that the Korean graduate students are in the developmental process of academic writing featured by a shift from clausal style to phrasal style as their academic level advances. The results also suggest that the students have difficulty in appropriate bundle use in specific rhetorical moves even at the later academic level of graduate coursework. The pedagogical implications of L2 students’ developmental order are discussed.

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.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between metacognitive awareness and the use of reading strategies in L1 and L2 reading depending on the participants' L2 reading proficiency. A total of 167 Korean EFL university students participated in this study. They responded to questionnaires asking about their metacognitive reading strategies in their L1 and L2 reading for academic purposes. The findings showed that (a) there were positive relationship between L1 reading and L2 reading in terms of their use of metacognitive reading strategies, and (b) significant differences were found in the use of strategies in L1 vs. L2 reading in terms of L2 reading proficiency: L1 and L2 global strategy use in the high proficiency group, L1 and L2 support strategy use in the high, intermediate, and low proficiency groups, and overall L1 and L2 metacognitive reading strategy use in the intermediate proficiency group. There were no significant differences in L1 and L2 problem-solving strategy use in all three proficiency groups. The most influential factor in predicting overall use of L2 metacognitive reading strategies was found to be L1 global strategy use. Pedagogical implications for strategy-based reading instruction were suggested.