Narrative and Grammatical Analyses of Story-retelling in Chinese Speakers of Korean as a Second Language

Although the narrative development and the acquisition of the Korean grammatical morphemes by monolingual Korean-speaking children have been studied extensively, little is known about the narrative characteristics and the processes through which native speakers of other languages (L2 speakers) use the Korean grammatical morphemes. To understand the similarities and differences between L1 and L2 narrative skills and Korean grammatical morpheme use, 13 native Chinese-speaking college students who are learning Korean as a second language were studied. L2 participants used significantly fewer words, subordinate clauses, connective morphological endings, and pronouns per T-unit. Their speech also illustrated significantly more omission and confusion (substitution) errors in the use of auxiliary words and verb endings. Some of the syntactic and morphological factors need to be considered for the intervention of speakers with limited Korean proficiency.