Differences in the Use of Reporting Verbs Between Korean EFL Writers and Native English Writers

Abstract

Reporting verbs are an important device in academic writing. This paper examines differences in the use of reporting verbs in academic papers between Korean EFL writers and native English writers. For this purpose, the current study analyzes two corpora of 200 research papers published in scholarly journals — 100 articles written by native English writers and another 100 articles written by Korean EFL writers. The findings of the study show that there are no considerable differences between the two corpora in the overall use of reporting verbs. Moreover, the usage patterns of reporting verbs are not significantly different between the two groups in terms of their function. Both groups of writers show a preference for verbs from the research acts category over the cognition acts category and the discourse acts category; however, the items within the categories vary between the two groups. The findings of the present study provide some insights into becoming more sensitive to the gap between Korean EFL writers and Native writers in the use of reporting verbs.