[CUFS_TESOL Foundations and Methods] 1st Discussion

Q. Cross-linguistic influence happens when someone is learning an L2. What are some cross-linguistic influences that might occur when a Korean L1 speaker is learning English as their L2?

I’ve found the two cross-linguistic influences from the students, mostly from elementary ones to middle schoolers whom I have taught so far in English class.

The first one is the different word order between Korean and English when describing a place and time. In English, the information “when” follows “where”, while the position of those details are switched in Korean language. I think it is because of the tendency of eastern culture viewing things in a whole at first glance, rather than seeing objects in detail, which is solely my opinion of why my first language, Korean, puts time ahead of place. I often find this happens when I ask middle school students to translate English sentences into Korean. If one applies the Korean order of time-to-place to the challenged sentence, it is always easy to give her/him feedback to correct on her/his own. However, it is never easy to make them fully understand why such an error occurs.

And this second issue, in my opinion, is the most frequently found when you teach younger kids aged between 8 and 10. My current students always say hello to me when they come into class. Then they are asked “How are you today?” and they habitually make a mistake of responding in “Happy” or “Excited”, simply with such a feeling word. I actually don’t see it as wrong, because there is no problem in their saying from a communicative perspective. Rather, their cute error has given me a chance to think about the real reason of the students’ omitting a subject and a copula: it is so uncommon for Koreans to use pronouns, especially “I”, in their statement. In this respect, the students might have said in the way to which they are used when speaking in Korean.