• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.1-27
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• 2014

This study investigates how common English hedge expressions such as 'I think' and 'I guess' appear in Korean, with the aim of providing explicit explanation for English-speaking leaners of Korean. Based on a contrastive analysis of spoken English and Korean corpus, this study argues three points: Firstly, 'I guess' appears with a wider variety of modalities in Korean than 'I think'. Secondly, this study has found that Korean textbooks contain inappropriate use of registers regarding the English translations of '-geot -gat-': although these markers are used in spoken Korean, they were translated into written English. Therefore, this study suggests that '-geot -gat-' be translated into 'I think' in spoken English, and into 'it seems' in the case of written English and narratives. Lastly, the contrastive analysis has shown that when 'I think' is used with deontic modalities such as 'I think I have to', Korean use '-a-ya-get-': the use of hedge marker 'I think' with 'I have to', which shows obligation or speaker's volition turns the deontic modalities into expressions of speaker's opinion.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.25-38
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• 2017

This study investigates non-native speakers(NNS) of English use of backchannels with beginner-intermediate learners' use of 'uh', 'um(uhm)', 'and' and 'hm' suggesting a view as a possible pedagogical implication. The initial aim of this study was to learn this phenomenon and observe their conversation patterns to compare with previous studies. Based on the previous findings, the analyzed data using conventional Conversation Analysis (CA) methods indicate the possible presence of L1 topic markers, '-un' and '-nun' in the form of L2 backchannel tokens when uttered by beginning and intermediate level speakers of English and the presences of L2 backchannel tokens appear only in front of noun phrases. Additionally, these same words with these tokens and when translated back to Korean also require topic markers of '-un' and '-nun.' Finally, This study discusses possible pedagogical implications with the initial analysis of backchannel tokens for Korean EFL learners. In addition, the ultimate goal of this study is to refine this analysis with follow up experiments to validate this investigation into a working hypothesis generating discussions of this backchannel phenomenon from being viewed as a hindrance to as an positive influence that needs to be understood.