Corpus Linguistics for Korean Language Learning and Teaching (review)

The advent of the use of corpora has greatly influenced the study of language in recent decades. It has even been said that corpora have brought about a revolution in the study of language. Thanks to technological developments, huge amounts of linguistic data can be made available, and corpora assist a variety of research in applied linguistics as well as general linguistics. With the recent growth of interest in teaching and learning Korean as a second language, a number of productive studies have been conducted using Korean corpora. The book under review is a timely introduction to applying Korean corpora to the second language classroom.

This book is a volume of the National Foreign Language Resource Center Technical Reports series edited by Robert Bley-Vroman and Hyunsook Ko. The edited collection presents corpus-based approaches to teaching and learning Korean as a second language and practical details of corpus data implementation for instruction. The book consists of four parts with nine chapters— introduction, two parts on corpus analysis of particular items in Korean, and one part on pedagogical applications for vocabulary learning.

In chapter 1, Bley-Vroman and Siwon Park review overall theoretical issues as an introduction to corpus linguistics for second language research and learning. They compare native corpora and learner corpora by examining characteristics in representatives, language variation, genre, availability, annotation, and generalizability. They also explain why corpus linguistics as a data-driven and empirical approach is necessary and how teachers can utilize corpus data in the field of second language teaching and learning. Despite many advantages of using corpora, Bley-Vroman and Park point out some difficulties of building the corpus data, such as availability of computer tools, a lack of learner corpora, and time-consuming and demanding work.

The second part provides three studies analyzing Korean sentence endings and verbs. In chapter 2, Sung-Ock Sohn compares the sentence endings -ketun(yo) and -canha(yo) using spoken corpora and daily conversations. Sohn points out that despite its enormous size, the Sejong Corpus is deficient in genre and topic. Moreover, compared to its written data, the Sejong Corpus has limited spoken data. For this study, therefore, she builds on spoken data collected from unplanned, spontaneous conversation discourses in which the ending makers -ketun(yo) and -canha(yo) occur frequently. Sohn analyzes frequency, discourse functions, and prosodic features of these two sentential endings, and, based on the findings, suggests some pedagogical models using -ketun(yo) and -canha(yo) in discourse contexts.

In chapter 3, Jong Myung Hong examines the distributional features of -e iss, which forms serial-verb constructions in Korean. Based on previous findings on distributional constraints of -e iss, Hong searches the Sejong Corpus and analyzes five verbs that are most frequently connected with -e iss in serial-verb constructions, for example, toy- "become," se- "stand," nam- "leave," tul- "contain/be included," and sal- "live."

In chapter 4, Hye-Ri Joo discusses how to teach Korean words with multiple meanings and functions. Joo focuses on the the frequently used verb pota "see/look at," searches its dictionary meanings, and analyzes its usages and collocations based on different genre corpora, such as TV dramas, TV news, newspapers, literary works, and science books. Joo presents tables and charts to display word frequency and example sentences and frequent collocations of the verb pota in each genre. Finally, she provides language teachers guidelines for teaching words; multiple meanings, and functions and suggests example teaching material.

Part three of the book presents studies on Korean particles, interrogative nouns, and adverbs. In chapter 5, Hyunsook Ko investigates syntactic and semantic functions of the Korean particle -ka by examining data retrieved from the CETConc Korean corpus. First, Ko compares -ka with another particle, -nun, with respect to semantic functions. Then, emphasizing less compatible features of the particle -ka in double nominative structures, Ko presents the frequency of -ka in...