By adopting a usage-based approach to language acquisition, this study investigated the emergence and development of L2 constructional knowledge. A total of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs) and their associated verbs were extracted from a learner corpus and three verbal fluency tasks, each conducted in L1 and L2 English and L1 Korean. We compared verb usage in the target VACs across proficiency levels between the L1 and L2 groups and between data types for VAC productivity and verb-VAC associations. The results identified three stages through which Korean learners’ VAC knowledge develops in L2 English: emerging through the frequent use of a few general verbs, expanding the range of verbs associated with a VAC to include more specific and prototypical verb types, and then developing them into a creative constructional schema. Moreover, we determined similarities between L1 and L2 English VAC knowledge in higher L2 proficiency levels, as well as L1 Korean influences related to L1 typology and L1 collocational transfer.

As a preliminary study for the effective development of a genre-focused English learner corpus, this article aims to investigate most frequent error types and their frequencies in English emails written by undergraduate freshmen in South Korea. Data for this study include English emails of 86 Korean students majoring in humanities or social science in a university located in Daegu. With the rise of Internet, ESL/EFL education has witnessed a growing interest in teaching email usage in composition courses, as it provides a variety of opportunities to evaluate language abilities including interpersonal and pragmatic abilities. The present article revealed that the most frequent error type was concerned with style, such as capitalization (28.7%) and punctuation (7.8%), which was followed by determiner deletion (6.3%), genre convention such as closing (3%), countability of nouns (3%), and verb choice (2.7%). Different error types and frequencies were identified according to different English proficiency levels (Korean SAT and TOEIC), which evidenced the need to include the English proficiency level annotation in the corpus design and to focus on different types of errors in class in accordance with learners’ proficiency levels.

This study mainly explores the research themes and topics of corpus-based studies published in English Teaching in an attempt to provide future directions and pedagogical implications in this research domain. For the purposes of the study, a total of 42 corpus-based research articles published in English Teaching were reviewed and analyzed in terms of research topics, methodology, and characteristics of the corpora employed in the studies. The thematic and topical analysis of the corpus-based studies showed that much research, i.e., 64%, has focused on the analysis ofvocabulary items. Further, the analysis of the research methods revealed that corpus-based studies published in English Teaching mainly employed quantitative methods to describe frequency and distribution information of the target linguistic items. It also provided the description of the characteristics of the corpora adopted in the corpus-based research. Interestingly, many corpus-based studies published in English Teaching focused on the analysis of the learner corpus data. The paper discusses the future research directions and pedagogical implications for corpus-based studies on TEFL.

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.

By comparing a corpus of Korean learners of English with a native speaker corpus, this study shows to what extent and in what ways Korean learners acquire English modal verbs can, could, may, and might (Hunston 2002). This corpus study revealed that the Korean learners underused could, may, and might. Two factors can explain the pattern of the Korean learners’ acquisition of the 4 modal verbs. First, the difficulty of combining tense with the modal verbs impedes the learners’ preterit form use of the modal verbs. Second, the epistemic modality is acquired much later than the root modality such as possibility, permission, and ability (Gibbs 1990). Since may and might typically associate with the epistemic modality, the learners rarely used those modal verbs.

This study deals with Korean learners' acquisition of English negatives. According to previous research, learners of English pass through a stage that demonstrates the characteristics of learners' interlanguage. Using a learner corpus (KELC), we show that Korean learners progress through several developmental stages before they master English negation. In addition, the errors made at each developmental stage reflect learners' knowledge of syntactic representation in terms of functional categories. Specifically, at the beginner level, the learners do not use auxiliaries at all. As they move to the intermediate level at which the functional category begins to be used, they start using auxiliaries in front of the negator. However, their outcomes are undermined with inflection errors either on the auxiliary or on the thematic verb. Finally, at the advanced level, the inflection errors disappear although still the present tense dominates where the past tense is required. This developmental pattern is in accord with the stages reported in the literature and the maturation of syntactic representation (i.e., functional categories).

This paper examines the behavior of predicational adverbs in a learner corpus of English, focusing on an overall distributional pattern, the correlation between adverbial meaning and position, and common error types. Two types of essays (argumentative and narrative) produced by university freshmen at two proficiency levels (beginner and high-intermediate) were selected for analysis from the one-million word Yonsei English Learner Corpus (YELC). Notable findings from the analysis include the following: 1) The high level learner corpus, and the argumentative writings within the same level, contained more predicational adverbs, both in diversity and frequency, demonstrating the role of L2 proficiency and text type in the fluency with which the learners employed predicational adverbs. 2) Knowledge of scopal distinction began to emerge, i.e. the distinction between VP-level and S-level adverbs or between speech acts and evaluative adverbs. 3) Errors involving lexical selection were more common than word order errors, corroborating the observation in previous research that lexico-semantic learning trails behind syntactic learning. Considering both the crucial role of adverbial modification as a key to nuance in communication and the difficulty of acquiring lexical selection, it is recommended that more emphasis be given to the lexico-semantic aspects of adverbs in the L2 classroom.