Summary

Some studies have shown that Korean students learning English struggle with nuances of academic or professional style. A study was conducted, comparing Korean writers with native English writers at the college level. This study offered some refinements over previous corpus studies. It was found that Korean writers overused and underused various connectors compared to the native writers, specifically in their use of contrastive markers, topic transitionals, presentational ‘there is’ and ‘there are’, markers for enumerating sequences, and exemplifiers. They also certain expressions used incorrectly as connectors due to apparent transfer errors. A similar study with Chinese writers found similar patterns. These data indicate a number of issues for ESL/EFL writing teachers to address, and some suggestions for teaching are discussed.

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  Methods: Corpus research, loglinear regression in SAS
• Results: Two published research papers
 

Publications

• Lee, K. (2020). Chinese ESL writers’ use of English contrastive markers. English Language Teaching, 32(4), 89-110. https://dx.doi.org/10.17936/pkelt.2020.32.4.5
• Lee, K. (2013). Koreans’ use of English connectors and topic management in writing. English Language Teaching, 25(2), 81-103.