Kim, Sue-jung, You, Seok-Hoon. 2011. L1-transfer effect in the acquisition of ‘eye’ idioms by English-speaking learners. Language Information . Volume 12. 5-24.
The purpose of this study is to examine the acquisition of Korean ‘eye’ idioms by second or foreign language learners of Korean, whose native language is English. ‘Eye’ idioms in both Korean and English are collected and compared for their semantico-functional characteristics. For the purpose of a consistent and contrastive analysis between these two, new criteria for classification of the target idioms into relevant 4 types are suggested. In order to examine the semantico-functional characteristics of these idioms in the acquisition process, an experiment is designed for a total of 20 learners of Korean in the intermediate and advanced levels. For the experiment, two kinds of tests are devised and administered. Results are analyzed in terms of types of target idioms, learners’ proficiency levels and the familiarity of idioms by appearance in the text books. Based on the findings of the study, a few pedagogical suggestions on an effective education of Korean ‘eye’ idioms to foreign learners are proposed. (Department of Linguistics, Korea University)
Key words: body part idioms, ‘eye’ idioms, principle of compositionality, acquisition of Korean as L2, L1-transfer, 신체관용표현, ‘눈’ 관용표현, 합성성의 원리, 제 2 언어로서의 한국어 습득, 모국어 전이