Communicative Functions and Argument Structure Constructions in Korean Middle School Students English Speaking Interaction

Abstract

This study explored Korean middle school students use of communicative functions and argument structure constructions (ASCs) in English speaking interactions. A total of 25 eight graders participated in this study. They carried out five pairs of tasks in Korean and in English. After the students oral production was recorded and transcribed, the corpus data were coded in terms of types of utterances, communicative functions and English ASCs. First, all utterances were classified into either fragmental or non-fragmental utterances. Second, they were also categorized by communicative functions provided in the Seventh National Curriculum. Third, the L2 non-fragmental utterances were further analyzed by types of ASCs. The results provided significant findings related to the gap between the use of communicative functions in L1 and L2 interactions and to the use of ASCs in L2 interactions. First, the most frequently occurring function in the L1 interactions was the sharing of information, while the function of expressing emotion appeared most frequently in the L2 interactions. The comparison between the L1 and L2 interactions revealed that the function of sharing information decreased the most dramatically both in the fragmental and non-fragmental utterances. That is, students expressed their communicative intents related to sharing information significantly less frequently in L2 than in L1. Second, as to the use of English ASCs, the students relied on limited types of ASCs, and simple transitive [V+NP] was the most frequently used. The number of English ASC types, however, formed a statistically positive correlation with the number of utterances in a sentential syntactic structure. Lastly, the function in which the most various types of English ASCs were employed was the sharing of information. With regard to these findings, the study concluded with some pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies.