Student perceptions of sociocultural aspects of Korean and the Korean variety of English (KVE)

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the perceptions of 80 Korean university students majoring in English about sociocultural elements embedded in the Korean language and KVE. A secondary objective is to enhance students’ awareness of the connection between culture and language and some of the unique sociocultural characteristics of these two languages. To this end, all participants took part in a 3-part classroom activity in which they examined pairs of KVE and Korean sentences, translated both KVE and Korean sentences, and took part in small focus group discussions. Specifically, the study has two research questions: 1) What sociocultural aspects of KVE and Korean did the participants identify? 2) What reasons did participants identify for these sociocultural aspects?