This study is aimed at suggesting an educational method of effectively teaching and learning the aspectual auxiliary verbs to the foreign learners of the Korean language who learn Korean as the target language. The subject of the study are the auxilia...
This study is aimed at suggesting an educational method of effectively teaching and learning the aspectual auxiliary verbs to the foreign learners of the Korean language who learn Korean as the target language. The subject of the study are the auxiliary verbs that indicate progressive aspect ‘-고 있다’, ‘-어 오다’, ‘-어 가다’ and the auxiliary verbs that indicate perfect aspect ‘-어 놓다’, ‘-어 두다’, ‘-어 버리다’, ‘-어 내다’.
Before suggesting a method of teaching and learning, from preceding research, we examined the concept about aspect and the meaning, form and syntactic rules that each auxiliary predicate represents. After dividing the concept into progressive and perfect aspects, we examined tense expression, combination relationship based on the meaning and semantic features of the verbs, co-occurrence relationships with adverbials, subject and sentence final endings. Progressive auxiliary verbs and perfect auxiliary verbs have different kinds of verbs that they can combine with as their preceding predicates and there are adverbials that specify progressive and perfect aspects. Then we examined whether these characteristics are reflected on the textbooks that the foreign learners of the Korean language use. We also examined at which stage the aspectual auxiliary verbs are presented and identified the problems with priority given to explanation of the meaning, example sentences and descriptive aspects of exercises. Progressive aspect was presented at the beginning and intermediate levels; perfect aspect was presented at the intermediate and advanced levels. With regard to progressive aspect, stages of presentation were similar to each other from textbook to textbook, but with regard to perfect aspect, stages of presentation were different from textbook to textbook and there were some textbooks in which it was not even mentioned. With regard to explanation of the meaning, there were textbooks that explained well the concept about aspect and there were textbooks that did not explain it. The example sentences did not show the morphological and syntactic characteristics well, and the exercises lacked the variety of verbs, adverbials, the person of subject and sentence final endings.
Next, we took as the subject of the study the foreign students in local undergraduate programs and examined the usage aspects of Korean learners. With regard to the usage aspects of the learners, we analyzed the learner factors such as gender, length of stay, length of studies, TOPIK rating, and the linguistic factors such as percentage of correct answers according to the verbs and adverbials used in non-auxiliary predicates and the frequency of item selection. The learners used the progressive aspect more accurately than the perfect aspect. With regard to progressive aspect, percentage of correct answers was higher in the order of ‘-고 있다’, ‘-어 오다’, ‘-어 가다’ and with regard to perfect aspect, percentage of correct answers was higher in the order of ‘-어 버리다’, ‘-어 놓다’, ‘-어 두다’, ‘-어 내다’ which is the same order as the aspectual auxiliary verbs are presented in the Korean textbook. However, percentage of correct answers in the auxiliary verbs except ‘-고 있다’ and ‘-어 버리다’ is less than 50%, which implies that acquisition and use is not properly being done. That is, it is decided that it shows problems with explanations of the meaning, example sentences and exercises in the textbook. Therefore, this study suggests some ways to improve the problems with the existing Korean textbooks in its plan for teaching the aspectual auxiliary verbs.
The instruction model adopted by this education plan is ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) by Harmer (2007). As for specific teaching and learning materials, input enhancement methods were used. The concepts of the aspectual auxiliary verbs were illustrated using picture materials, and the sentences that would be used were presented with the pictures. A variety of example sentences and exercises were used according to the kind of the verbs that can be combined with as preceding predicates, the adverbials that can co-occur, the person of subject and sentence final endings. These example sentences and exercises were presented using visual enhancement methods such as using pictures and highlighting the font or changing the color of specified items. We also suggested practice activities considering efficiency and appropriateness and presented examples for assignments and evaluation.