Referential Choices of Korean EFL Learners

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The current study strives to understand how factors known to affect the referential choices of native speakers, i.e. grammatical role/ order-of-mention and thematic roles, influence the Korean EFL learners' choice of referential forms. Data was gathered by having native speakers of English (NSE), higher level EFL learners (HLL), lower level EFL learners (LLL) and native speakers of Korean (NSK) continue the given stories. The results suggest that Korean EFL learners as well as native speakers of both languages tend to use both factors in their referential choices, using pronouns more than proper names when they refer to the subject/first-mentioned referent than the object/second-mentioned one, and when they refer to the goal referent than source referent. However, the overall frequency of L2 learners' pronoun reference was significantly smaller than NSE, especially in the object referent cases. Considering the fact that the object/second-mentioned character was always referred to with a full name by NSKs, it can be suggested that the learners identify pronouns in English with zero anaphors in Korean, which require higher accessibility to be used. On the other hand, learners actively used thematic role cue, which is one of the semantic cues that are thought to be universal strategies used by L2 learners.