부산대학교 도서관

This paper explores how Korean learners acquire English wh-questions and which syntactic rules are involved, and whether Input Processing Instruction (PI) can facilitate Korean students' acquisition of English wh-questions. The acquisition patterns of English wh-questions by 50 middle school students were measured through Grammaticality Judgement Test (GJT), and PI lessons were given to 25 out of the 50 students in four 15-minutes for two weeks. The major findings of this experimental study are as follows: (1) Korean middle school students preferred subject wh-questions over object ones both in simple and embedded clauses, and sentence complexity such as embedding depth and preposition stranding greatly influenced their judgements. (2) PI was effective in that students improved significantly in GJT after short-term lessons. This study concludes that Korean middle school students have not yet fully acquired syntactic properties of English wh-questions and thus PI can benefit L2 learners in the early stage of interlanguage development.