유생성이 초등학교 학생들의 영어 연어능력에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The objective of the current study was to investigate how much six-grade Korean elementary school students are aware of collocation of English words that have animacy. We conducted an exam of words that elementary students learn from school. The words included animated same-encode word and animated different-encode to evaluate how the degree of difficulty differ between these two word groups. Also within the animated different-encode words, marked and unmarked words were included to test if there was any differences in how students understand the words. The test results were analyzed in groups of animated same-encode group and animated different-encode group. The animated different-encode group was divided further into marked or unmarked group and mean score was compared between the groups. The results of evaluation of the six-grade elementary students' collocation ability of English are stated below.

Firstly, the mean difference between the animated same-encode group and the animated different-encode group was analyzed using t-test. The mean score of the animated same-encode group was higher than the animated different-encode group by 20.22 and the t-test of the difference was statistically significant (p<.0001). Therefore, Korean six-grade elementary students take the animated different-encode words harder than the animated same-encode words.

Secondly, the mean scores between the animated different-encode marked word group and the animated different-encode unmarked word group was analyzed using t-test. The mean score of the unmarked word group was higher than the marked word group by 25.49 and the difference was statistically significant (p<.0001). However, the percentage of correct answers for words such as full, heavy and short did not differ whether they were used as marked or unmarked. For the rest of 12 words the percentage of correct answer was higher when the words were used for marked than unmarked. Therefore, we can conclude that six-grade students lack collocation ability when English words are expressed differently in Korean because of animacy.

The reason for this phenomenon is that Korean six-grade elementarystudents are not aware of the differences between Korean and English for animacy expression. Also, a word was taught with only one meaning so it results lacking to learn the other meanings of the word such as marked. Thus, it is necessary to educate differences in animacy expression so that collocation ability of students can be improved and to increase probability to study marked words. And studying vocabulary is different from studying grammar and one should study repetitively and continuously. Also, English textbook in theelementary school should list collocation words in each chapter and teaching aid materials for the teacher should be provided. Should teacher understand the necessity of teaching collocation, it will be very helpful to improve English communication ability of elementary school students.