The purpose of this study is to investigate the acquisition of Korean Josa's combination for Japanese learners of Korean. The studies on Korean Josa's combination have been steadily conducted in both the Korean language field and the Korean language e...
The purpose of this study is to investigate the acquisition of Korean Josa's combination for Japanese learners of Korean. The studies on Korean Josa's combination have been steadily conducted in both the Korean language field and the Korean language education field. There have been a good number of research studies on this topic, especially in the field of Korean language education. However, among these studies, there is only some research that focuses on the formative features of Korean Josa's combination. Moreover, these studies on the acquisition of particle combination have targeted only Chinese learners. Therefore, this study aims to examine how Japanese learners who use Japanese, which is linguistic typologically similar to Korean.
Chapter I shows the purpose of this study and the advanced research related to the studies of particle combination. It proposes the necessity of a new study based on the advanced research and also presents the research problems. The research problems are as follows: firstly, compared to Korean native speakers, what does Japanese learners’ acquisition of particle combination in terms of combination forms look like? Secondly, Can fluency be taken as a variable in this study of particle combination?
In chapter II, to solve the research problems demonstrated in chapter I, Korean case markers have been classified into grammatical case markers, semantic case markers, post positions, and particles, in accordance with Im Dong Hoon(2004)’s viewpoint on the subclassification of Korean Josas based on distributional characteristics. Moreover, each particle combination can be largely divided into 4 forms, or subdivided into a total of 16 forms, according to order of arrangement. Continuously, the characteristics of formative features and theoretical background are presented. Also, each Japanese expression equivalent to the Korean in formative features has been organized and the equivalent ones have been taken into examination as well.
Chapter Ⅲ describes the development of the research instrument. In order to examine the acquisition of Josa's combinations of Japanese learners of Korean, a grammaticality judgment test was developed as a measure. Sixty-four questions were created according to each form of Josa's combination used in the experiment. The subjects of this study were 46 students who are: firstly, Japanese learners of Korean with higher proficiency than level 4 who are studying Korean at Korean Language Institutes of the universities in a metropolitan area; and secondly, current undergraduate students and graduate students of domestic universities.
Chapter IV describes the results of the experiment conducted through the tool referred in chapter III. The result shows that: firstly, there appeared the difference in the percentages of correct answers regarding combination forms based on order of arrangement. This statistically significant difference showed the difference between Korean native speakers and Japanese learners of Korean in using Josa's combination. Moreover, the acquisition aspect of Josa's combination forms was also revealed. Contrastively, in Japanese the form pre-modified by a postposition is acquired differently from Korean. In actuality, Japanese learners of Korean showed the lowest percentage of correct answers on the aforementioned form. Secondly, the results show whether or not fluency as a role of variable acquisition of Josa's combination has been taken into consideration. According to the result, the group of high-achieving students showed higher percentages of correct answers than the group of low-achieving students in all combination forms. With that statistically meaningful result, we can draw a conclusion that the learners’ fluency in Korean is one of a variable in this research.
Finally, chapter V draws the conclusion of this study as well as refers to its significance and limitation. This study is significant in the sense that it investigated the formative features of Josa's combination as well as identified the acquisition aspect of Japanese learners of Korean. Based on this result, it is realized that in Korean language education the instruction on the formative features of combination form needs to be imparted explicitly. Also, through the comparison to Japanese, there is a discussion about the combination form that needs to be well emphasized when acquiring Josa's combination. Moreover, there was a confirmation that the fluency variable did exist in the acquisition of the characteristics of Josa's combination.
However, the limitation of this study is that the number of the items of Josa's combination suggested is not inclusive. Moreover, since this study concentrates on the formative features, that the change in the semantic function according to the combination of Josa remains uncovered becomes a limitation of this study.
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