Correlation between Comprehension and Production in Learning Epistemic Modals by Korean EFL Learners

주혜라

Correlation between Comprehension and Production in Learning Epistemic Modals by Korean EFL Learners

Modern English Education
Abbr : MEESO
2010, 11(1), pp.1-17
Publisher : The Modern English Education Society
Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Language Teaching

주혜라 ¹

¹선문대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This research aims to examine to what extent the knowledge and processes used by Korean learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) for comprehension of epistemic modal (EM) verbs are related to those of production and why the learners’ability to use EM in comprehension is often delayed or not realized in their production. EM is a linguistic means to present one’s evaluation and degree of confidence in the knowledge described in one's utterance. The production test adopted a timed free writing test type, while the comprehension test used a fill-in-the-blank type with two EM answer choices given. Also, an untimed guided rewriting test was used for measuring production and comprehension. Correlation results in this study suggest the production and comprehension are strongly interrelated in such a way that syntactic competence in EM first induces a connection between form and meaning, facilitating the constructions of sentences using EM. However, without recourse to a firm grasp of semantic knowledge of EM, it is difficult to lead EM to emerge in real communication. Thus, syntactic competence combined with semantic competence of EM is essential in the actual uses of EM.

KEYWORDS

epistemic modals/comprehension/production/implicit knowledge

Citation status

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