Earticle

This study aims to establish the basic sentence patterns of Korean so that foreign learners can study Korean more efficiently. It is required for foreign learners to apply the sentence patterns to the certain communicative situations instead of obtaining just linguistic knowledge. Therefore, the use of the sentence patterns should be suggested in forms that reveal syntactical characteristics of Korean faithfully. The basic sentence patterns here are presented as born structures which can be a part of every sentence and foreign learners can transform and expand the patterns according to their expressive intention. The research sets the fifteen basic sentence patterns in conformity with the word order, essential arguments and syntactical and semantical characteristics of the predicate. The sentence patterns are based on the natural word order of Korean and the number of their essential arguments. The essential arguments are suggested in forms which specify the function and meaning in essential elements of a sentence by a part of speech and a mark of case.

As a fundamental component of language, writing has been identified as the least proficient domain in acquiring a new language. Due to this universal idea, this research has been designed to find a more effective method to improve the writing skills of EFL learners and makes an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of a basic sentence pattern (BSP) drill through film corpus-based activities. To do this, as a pre-test, EFL learners were asked to make questionnaires with basic sentence patterns that translate Korean sentences into English to determine how much basic knowledge they had. For the questionnaires and the basic sentence pattern drill, the script of the American television series Modern Family (Lloyd & Levitan, 2014) was collected and categorized into five basic sentence patterns. Then, the learners were taught about the 5th basic sentence pattern, the most difficult pattern and were trained to practice this sentence pattern, repetitively, for a month. As a final step, they took a post-test after another month’s training. The results show the overall score was enhanced significantly from pre-test to post-test. This finding demonstrates that basic sentence patterns can enable EFL learners to develop their sentence accuracy in writing.

The purpose of this study is to research whether Chinese learners of Korean who have reached the advanced level of Korean language are using the correct basic sentence patterns of Korean. First of all, basic sentence patterns were divided into 23 kinds of patterns such as 9 intransitive verb patterns, 4 transitive verb patterns, 6 adjective patterns, and 4 ‘is’ patterns. Then, these 23 patterns were used to analyze 27 texts written by Chinese learners of Korean. The results of the analysis found that Chinese learners’ usage of basic sentence patterns were limited, and we can find a total of 10 errors such as ‘Subject Omission’, ‘Object Omission’, ‘Predicate Omission’, ‘Error of Subject?Case?Marker’, ‘Error of Object?Case?Marker’, ‘Error of Complement?Case?Marker’, ‘Error of Adverbial?Case?Marker’, ‘Sequence Error of Subject and Predicate’, ‘Sequence Error of Object and Predicate’, ‘Sequence Error of Adverbs and Predicate’. In addition, the frequency of using basic sentence patterns by Chinese learners varies greatly depending on the sentence patterns. There also seemed to be a slight lack of awareness of the function of predicate. This research is significant in that it has recognized the importance of basic sentence patterns which have been the fringe in Korean language education. And it is especially meaningful in that it analyzed Chinese Korean learners’ written texts and proposed teaching methods.

The purpose of this paper is to point out two problems mentioned explanation of the basic sentence pattern and to present the alternative proposal in current Korean School Grammar. The reason of the establishment of the basic sentence pattern in current Korean school grammar is that Korean School Grammar is performing the role of the Representative Grammar of Korean. First problem is caused by confounding the concept of the constituent as a grammatical unit with the concept of the valency of predicate. Second problem take its origin in the misunderstanding of the property of verb. But the concept of the constituent differ from the concept of the valency of predicate as a grammatical unit. Because a sentence is not regarded the unit of ‘subject+predicate’ any more in the concept of the valency of predicate. Therefore in current Korean School Grammar the concept of the valency of predicate must be abandoned. On the other hand, seven basic sentences in current Korean School Grammar must be changed eight basic sentences. Because the verb of korean language also have the common property of English verb.

In this article, we demonstrate in the framework of psychomechanics of language founded by Guillaume that the combination of NP and particles such as ‘ga’, ‘neun’ is not a morphological construction but constitutes a syntactic construction. And we claim that the form of basic sentence pattern should reflect information structure or discourse structure so that it can be consistent with the theory of markedness. So the patterns [X-(neun) Y-(ga) V-ending] and [X-(neun) Y-(leul) V-ending] replace the traditionally established patterns [X-ga Y-ga V] and [X-ga Y-leul V], respectively. The basic pattern [X-(neun) Y-(ga) V-ending] is, in itself, analysed as a simple sentence, even though it was regarded as complex sentence embedding ‘sentential predicate’ in school grammar. Among different types of ‘double subject constructions’, only two types like ‘코끼리는 코가 길다(Elephants have a long nose)’ and ‘나는 호랑이가 무섭다(I am scared of tigers)’ should be classified as basic sentenc patterns. In these constructions, the predicates ‘길-’ and ‘무섭-’ have the usages of two-place predicate. Therefore, their argument structures or semantic structure can be represented as follows; 〈X have_long Y〉 and 〈X be scared of Y〉. The other so-called double subject constructions such as ‘커피는 잠이 안 온다(With coffee, I can’t sleep’ or ‘철수는 마누라가 회사를 다닌다(As for Paul, his wife works in a company)’ are excluded from the category of basic sentence patterns, which are derived by topicalization from the marked construction ‘커피를 마시면/커피로는 (나) 잠이 안 온다(If I drink coffee/with coffee, I can’t sleep)’ or can be described as a part of the complex sentence as underlined in ‘철수는 마누라가 회사에 다녀서 돈 걱정을 안 한다(Paul does not have any financial concern, because his wife works in a company)’.

The purpose of this study is to analyze learners’ changes by four basic English sentence pattern practices applied to 4th grade elementary school students through qualitative research methods. The learners were drawn to pay attention to the patterns of the four basic sentence structures: WH- and Yes/No- Question, Affirmative and Negative. No explicit grammar instructions were provided. Lerner changes had been observed in both cognitive and affective areas through the pattern practices. Based on the sentence patterns, learners could memorize sentential expressions more easily than before. It was also observed that sentence pattern practices helped the learners build grammar sense by themselves and be able to apply word or phrase substitution to some expressions they had learned. Regarding affective changes, it was notable that learners’ feeling of achievement sparked their interest in learning English unlike the usual sparking-interest-first instruction.