This study aims to examine the use of citations by native Korean speakers and Korean language learners in academic reports, and to suggest implications for instruction on citations in academic reports, reflecting the characteristics of Korean language...
This study aims to examine the use of citations by native Korean speakers and Korean language learners in academic reports, and to suggest implications for instruction on citations in academic reports, reflecting the characteristics of Korean language learners. For graduate students, academic reports are valuable beyond temporary evaluations in classes and pertain directly to the process of thesis writing but have not yet received much attention in genre analysis research. In particular, compared to its necessity and importance in the academic context, the citation as covered in this study still lacks careful consideration in the field of Korean language education, and the research on direct analysis of texts written by Korean language learners is very lacking. The focus of the present study was to analyze citations based on the structure of texts, functions of citations, sentence types of citations, and types of reporting verbs in academic reports of native Korean speakers and Korean language learners, and to draw implications for teaching citations to Korean language learners based on these results.
The analysis criteria were set up as follows. First, the structure of the academic report was divided into the macro-structure of the ‘Introduction, Body, and Conclusion.’ These were further divided into six micro-structures: the ‘Introduction’ into ‘The purpose and necessity of the study, Previous studies’, the ‘Body’ into ‘Theoretical background, Research methods, Research results’, and the ‘Conclusion’ into ‘Conclusion’. The functions of citation were classified into ‘Attribution (Opinions, Research content, Research results, Facts, Research trends)’, ‘Comparison (Comparison between leading studies, Comparison of citation with author's own study)’, ‘Evaluation (Application of previous studies, Evaluation of previous studies)’, and ‘other (other).’ Depending on how the source functioned syntactically, the sentence types of citations were divided into nine categories: First ‘Source Integral and Source Non-integral’, and within these, the ‘Source Integral’ types were classified as ‘Including reporting verbs and Not-Including reporting verbs’, and then further sorted according to ‘the use of typical indirect reported marker ‘-go’, footnote locations’, etc. Finally, a list of reporting verbs used at high frequencies was extracted to analyze the usage patterns of reporting verbs. This was then compared to the use by type classified as ‘Discourse verbs, Cognitive verbs, Procedural verbs, and Finding verbs’, and examined according to patterns of tense, modalities, and auxiliary verbs combined with reporting verbs.
According to the analysis results, the microstructure of texts, the function of the citation, the sentence type of citation, and the pattern of use of reporting verbs showed statistically significant differences between native Korean speakers and Korean language learners. The characteristics of citation in academic reports were summarized as follows, according to the results of statistical analysis combined with text qualitative analysis. First of all, the characteristics of citation by text structures were ‘differences in usage patterns of citation by structure according to academic field and research method’ and ‘function of citation according to each structure's rhetorical purpose.’ The characteristics of function of citation were ‘importance of the citation author's interpretation and opinion’ and ‘politeness strategy in evaluating previous research function.' The characteristics of the citation sentence type were ‘sentence types of citation containing the intent of the author’, ‘original author functioning as various sentence components,’ and the characteristics of the reporting verbs were ‘reporting verbs focused on research actions of the previous study’ and ‘reporting verbs commonly accepted in the academic discourse community.’
Based on the above analysis results, this study suggests that Korean language learners need to increase their awareness of the function of citation considering genre characteristics and developing a citation attitude accompanied by interpretation and evaluation of previous research as a way to enhance the learner’s awareness of the citation. In terms of teaching and learning content and method, explicit education on the syntactic structure according to the citation’s sentence type and teaching methods connecting the meaning of vocabulary to genre knowledge. In addition, this study proposes a ‘teaching and learning model for integrated genre and language’ that integrates ‘genre knowledge’, ‘language system knowledge’ and ‘language skills.’ Finally, stage-appropriate teaching and learning contents for Korean learners are suggested.
This study is meaningful in that it applies an analytic framework that reflects the genre characteristics of academic reports, which has rarely been attempted in Korean language education, and carefully considers various aspects of the use of citations in academic reports by dividing them by structure, function and form. In particular, the present study is meaningful in that, through comparative analysis with native Korean speakers and Korean language learners, it was able to more clearly determine the characteristics of Korean language learners and in that it emphasizes the need for education linking genre knowledge with the improvement of language skills.