An account for Korean EFL learners’ use of adverbs of manner

This research aims to investigate how Korean EFL learners use adverbs of manner and why they have difficulty in using them. For this purpose, the written production from two groups of 62 Korean EFL learners are collected. The findings show that the learners seem to avoid using adverbs of manner. In particular, the learners with basic English proficiency use adverbs of manner less than the learners with high proficiency and in syntactic positions, the basic learners choose the position 'before a subject' the most and the advanced learners choose the position 'at the end of a clause.' A few differences between the two groups appear statistically significant for the positions which are 'after a verb', 'before a subject', 'between an object and an adverbial', and 'immediately before past participles.' Other than that, both groups show the feature that they use adverbs with the ending '-ly' more which were derived from adjective forms of their L1. Therefore, this study could posit that the learners' English proficiency may not be an entirely influencing factor for the use of adverbs of manner and Korean EFL learners have their preferred syntactic positions for adverbs. Finally, L1 transfer can be the other factor based on the result of their preference syntactic positions and the use of adverbs with the ending '-ly.' Therefore, it can be implied that when teaching English adverbs of manner, the specific explanation in semantic and syntactic regions to use English adverbs of manner should be required.