Korean EFL Learners` Use of Conjunctions in Spoken Narratives

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to examine the use of cohesive devices, especially conjunctions, in oral narratives spoken by adult Korean EFL learners and compare the results with those by English native speakers in the same experimental setting. The data consist of a total of 83 narratives spoken by 43 Korean EFL learners and 40 English native speakers, who were each asked to tell a brief story based on a sequence of 12 pictures in accordance with a given title. Our hypothesis is that learners will have difficulty in using cohesive devices such as conjunctions appropriately; More specifically, learners will underuse and misuse conjunctions in discourse due to the lack of their language proficiency. The results show that except for differences in some of the conjunctions, the learners were strikingly similar to the native speakers in the inventory and distribution of conjunctions they used, although there were some misused errors. The learners had a great tendency to overuse coordinate conjunctions, especially but and so, whereas they tended to underuse temporal subordinate conjunctions such as while and as. However, the overuse of initial subordinate clauses by the learners suggests that they haven not quite acquired the uses of conjunctions in discourse.