The L2 Developmental Sequence of English Constructions and Underlying Factors

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate a developmental sequence of various English constructions for Korean EFL learners and factors affecting the sequence. Using a cross-sectional design, this study administered a translation test including eight English constructions to three different groups: 26 middle school students in Grade 7, 24 high school students in Grade 10, and 15 university students with an English Education major. The results revealed that the easiest construction was intransitive-unergative, which was followed by transitive and intransitive-unaccusative. On the other hand, the most difficult ones were resultative, caused-motion and ditransitive in order. Intransitive-motion and intransitive-resultative were in between. This developmental sequence does not correspond to Goldberg's (1995) inheritance hierarchy of construction, indicating that the Korean EFL learners were poor at recognizing the internal relations among constructions. Furthermore, the development of each construction was not categorical in that certain items caused more difficulty than others even when they belonged to the same construction. This paper explains the results in relation to processing load caused by the number of the elements involved in a construction, prototypicality of verbs and constructions, and lexical knowledge.