The development of English personal reference in the Korean ESL learner corpus

Abstract

This study provides both qualitative and quantitative analysis of an emerging pattern regarding the establishment and maintenance of English personal reference as well as interaction between linguistic forms and discourse context The data for the study consist of approximately 44 hours of NS-NNS spontaneous conversations over 13 months. The research findings clearly demonstrate that even though the learners' production is constrained by limited English proficiency, learners convey their thoughts by means of discourse strategies and dependence on an intermediate system, e.g., repetition of NP for reference maintenance. Further, the learners' data exhibit a clear developmental pattern: (1) the emergence of linguistic forms prior to the mastery of form-function associations; (2) enhanced management of established referent in the later stages; and (3) display of a longer average distance between the referential phrases and their preceding mention in the later stages.