영어 형용사 smart와 clever의 사용에 관한 코퍼스 기반 분석과 언어 교육에 대한 시사점

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the use of two synonymous adjectives smart and clever through COCA, and to examine Korean college and graduate students` knowledge of smart/clever+noun expressions and to discuss its implications for language teaching and learning. The main findings of this study are as follows. First, the two adjectives smart and clever are synonymous, but their actual use in general are very different. Second, there seems to be a statistically significant tendency for a word to combine intensively with a few other words. Third, the two adjectives are very close in meaning, but sometimes they have a totally different meaning even when they combine with the same noun(business, design, marketing). Fourth, smart is much stronger than clever in the tendency toward combining with human nouns. Fifth, when intelligence adjectives are used with formal nouns, they combine more frequently with female nouns than male nouns. Sixth, the total average score of the two adjectives are as low as 53.3%, and the average score of smart(59.6%) was much higher than that of clever(40.5%). And there was a considerable difference between the Korean learners` responses and native English speakers` actual use. The result of this study strongly suggests that we should shift from individual word-based teaching to chunk-based teaching to improve EFL learners` communicative ability. Above all, an in-depth study of the actual use of common words frequently used in everyday life should be conducted as soon as possible.