Pedagogical Scenarios for Teaching Topic/Nominative Marking in Discourse

Abstract

Based on an error analysis of KFL learners' use of the topic marker (TM) and the nominative marker (NM), we will identify sources of common errors, define their semantically accurate and pragmatically appropriate uses within a pedagogical grammar of Korean, and then propose a series of pedagogical scenarios that facilitate acquisition of these markers. Most of the errors occurred in extended stretches of discourse rather than in isolated sentences, indicating that teaching discourse markers crucially needs pragmatic strategies that highlight target features in lieu of sentence-level, syntactic approaches. Linguistic analyses of the TM/NM in Korean have often treated them as analogous to their Japanese counterparts (Sohn, 1980); only recently have there been attempts to clarify important differences between the TM/NM in the two languages (E. Lee & Shimojo, 2011). Moreover, Korean pedagogical grammar treats the TM as: (1) a topic marker, (2) a contrastive marker, and (3) a marker of emphasis, and the NM as a subject marker, in much more simplistic terms Japanese pedagogical grammar (Noda, 1996). We propose that TM/NM (and bare nouns and zero pronominais) be taught in more concrete contexts with clear explanations of their discourse characteristics through activities designed to highlight their intended meanings and purposes. We believe that discourse marking should be introduced spirally along strategic points all the way up to advanced levels to reinforce its uses in complex structures and expand the learner's pragmatic repertoire of more subtle and interactional meanings.