한국 중학생들의 영어 구두점 사용 오류 분석

초록

In order to find out how well informed Korean middle school students are about English punctuation marks, this study analyzed a learner corpus consisting of compositions written by 99 Korean 7th grade students. 104 students were also given a test about comma uses, the results of which were compared with those from the corpus analysis. The main findings of the study can be summarized as follows. First, most of the students lacked the ability to compose grammatically correct sentences as only 1.7% of the sentences in the corpus were grammatical. Second, of the 1,536 tokens of punctuation marks needed to be used in the corpus, only 151 (9.7%) were used correctly, and about 98% of the errors were instances of omission. Third, of the 465 tokens of the comma needed in the corpus, 93 (20.0%) were used correctly, and about 99% of the errors were also instances of omission. Finally, the rate of errors were still over 54% when students were asked to provide necessary commas on a test. All these findings amount to the conclusion that Korean learners of English in 7th grade lack most of the grammatical knowledge to use punctuation marks appropriately.

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