Syntactic, lexical, and rhetorical differences in english prose written by native speakers of English and by native speakers of Korean

Comparative rhetoricians of the English language, whose research focus is mainly on identifying differences among different linguistic groups, have assumed that their research findings could be crucial "to comprehending and addressing English as Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) writer's special needs" (Silva, 1993, p. 660).

The purpose of this research study was in line with that of silva, identifying and examining in what different ways native speakers of English and native speakers of Korean wrote their expository essays in English in terms of the syntactic structures, lexical choices, cohesion devices, and rhetorical patterns.

Forty writing samples from the Korean students studying at the University of Tennessee/Knoxville and Indiana University of Pennsylvania and 42 writing samples from the American students at the University of Tennessee/Knoxville. were used the corpus for the data analysis in the present study.

The Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA), F-Test, and Chi-Square Test were run to test quantitatively whether differences in textual features between these two groups wore statistically significant or not. The quantitative differences were than examined qualitatively to better understand the reasons for differences between these two groups.

The MANOVA results indicated that there were significant differences in the Lexical Variables and the Cohesion Variables at p<.01 but not in the Discourse Fluency Variables (syntactic structure) in English prose written by native speakers of English and by native speakers of Korean. The qualitative results of the data analysis showed that there were conspicuous differences in rhetorical style (idea organization) between these two groups.

Based on the data analysis in the present study, it was concluded that Korean students of English had much difficulty in lexical choices, cohesion devices, and rhetorical patterns when they wrote academic expository prose in English. Thus, these differences in Korean students' essays, when compared to those written by American students, resulted in Korean students' low proficiency in English writing.

The research findings in the present study suggested some pedagogical implications for helping Korean-English composition teachers create effective instructional methods and teaching materials and for helping Korean students of English improve their English composition skills.