The present study aims to analyze developmental patterns of syntactic complexity and use of related grammatical items of Korean-American adolescents based on their writing samples to draw its implications on language education for Korean heritage lear... The present study aims to analyze developmental patterns of syntactic complexity and use of related grammatical items of Korean-American adolescents based on their writing samples to draw its implications on language education for Korean heritage learners. As the first step, a thorough literature review as well as a large-scale survey was conducted to analyze the meaning of heritage language education and determine the characteristics of heritage language learners. Also an extensive examination on methodology for second language development was performed to study a number of measures for syntactic complexity. Major methods of exploring language development of language learners were ‘Suppliance of Obligatory Context’ analysis, ‘Target-Like Use’ analysis, implicational scaling, and ‘Frequency Analysis.’ Subsequently, the appropriate research method and analytic tools for this specific study were devised. Although the principal participants of the study were Korean-American learners of Korean, native adolescent Korean speakers were assigned to a reference group to establish the level of target norm for Korean competency for that age group. After filtering the data, the final data set was composed of 407 writing samples of Korean-Americans collected by another researcher and 40 writing samples of native Korean speakers. The level of syntactic complexity of each writing sample was analyzed by four distinctive measures – (1) the number of morphemes per sentence, (2) the number of clauses per sentence, (3) coordinate index, (4) the number of embedded clauses per sentence. In order to investigate the use of related grammatical items, a revised form of Frequency Analysis was conducted. The main findings were as follows; (1) Korean proficiency of heritage language learners was the main factor that affects syntactic complexity of their writing while age variance did not have any significant impact, (2) the increase of syntactic complexity was remarkable from Level 3 through Level 5, but this increasing trend became stagnant afterwards, (3) the level of syntactic complexity of heritage language learners showed a substantial difference from that of native Korean speakers in their age group. In addition, the use of related grammatical items of heritage language learners dramatically changes over time showing the dynamics of language development. However, compared to native Korean speakers the range of grammatical items which frequently appeared in Korean-American heritage speakers’ writing samples were distinctly limited to that mostly used in oral communication. The implications from the analysis of syntactic complexity development were considered from three different categories – pedagogical content, textbook, and teaching method. The first of its kind in the field of Korean language education, the present study explored the syntactic complexity development of Korean-American heritage language learners by analyzing hundreds of writing samples. The analytic tools and findings in this study can be a potential guide for further research on language development of heritage learners. ，免费韩语论文，韩语论文网站 |
