A closer look at Korean students' written discourse

Abstract

This institutional research aimed to identify the common linguistic problems encountered by Korean students in written discourse. The researcher applied the descriptive method through Discourse Analysis and document review by collecting written outputs from 30 purposively selected Korean students enrolled in the University of Mindanao and various schools in Davao City at the time of this investigation. Specific morphosyntactic features were coded in matrix form based on the eight parts of speech and other linguistic features involved in writing. Based on the data gathered, the researcher discovered the four morphological processes are evident in their written discourses: affixation, compounding, allomorphs, and borrowing. There was no derivation, stress shift, clipping, acronym, blending, backformation, brand adoption, and onomatopoeia. In spelling, the incorrect orthographic representations in their write-ups are linguistically categorized as common nouns and proper nouns. The three most common syntactic problems were verb tenses, pronoun use, and pluralization of nouns aside from these spelling issues. In addition to the three aforementioned major syntactic issues, several writing mistakes were worth noticing, such as prepositions, punctuations, capitalizations, articles, adjectives, adverbs, subject-verb agreement, conjunctions, word choice, spelling, and sentence surface structure. Therefore, with these findings, It is pretty essential to conduct further study to look into the factors that influence the English language learning and acquisition of international students such as Koreans. Keywords: language, second language learning, written discourse, grammar, Korean students, qualitative, Philippines