This study investigated the hierarchy of difficulty among usages of 'that' by Korean EFL learners (N = 487). The usages of that were categorized into 11 different functions: Demonstrative Pronoun (DP), Demonstrative Determiner (DD), Adverb (Adv), Subj... This study investigated the hierarchy of difficulty among usages of 'that' by Korean EFL learners (N = 487). The usages of that were categorized into 11 different functions: Demonstrative Pronoun (DP), Demonstrative Determiner (DD), Adverb (Adv), Subjective Relative Pronoun (SR), Objective Relative Pronoun (OR), Relative Adverb (RA), Complementizer of Subject clause (CompS), Complementizer of Complement clause (CompC), Complementizer of Object clause (CompO), Complementizer of Appositive clause (CompA), and Adverbial Conjunction (AC). Including six questions for each usage, a total of 66 target questions were given to 487 second graders from two high schools in Korea. Mean scores of each usage were treated as difficulty indicators, so that an 11 level difficulty hierarchy was drawn from them as follows: CompS, DP, CompO, RA, OR, CompA, CompC, SR, AC, and DD, from the easier to more difficult. If there were some pairs between which had no significant difference in a pairwise comparison (using repeated measured ANOVA), they were merged into the same category of difficulty. As a result, 11 usages were classified into four difficulty groups of A, B, C and D as follows: A (CompS, DP), B (CompO, RA, OR, CompA, CompC, SR), C (AC, DD), and D (Adv), in the order of difficulty. This hierarchy was proved out to be stable through cross validation. The same order of hierarchy was validated across school, gender and English proficiency levels. Exceptionally, for lower English proficiency group, only the easiest rank A (CompS, DP) was the same as the finding and the other ranks (B, C, and D) had no significant difference in difficulty. This finding could help both Korean EFL teachers and learners in that they can predict the potential difficulties for certain usages of that, and decide to which usage to give more time and effort when teaching and learning. ，韩语论文网站，韩语论文网站 |
