‘On’ Usage across Native Speakers and Korean Learners of English

This study investigates the usage patterns of the preposition ‘on’ by categorizing its contexts into positional, temporal, and abstract categories and comparing native speakers with Korean learners. A total of 400 sentences were analyzed, with data sourced from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Gachon learner corpus. The findings reveal that native speakers exhibit a relatively balanced distribution across the three contexts, while Korean learners demonstrate a heavy reliance on positional usage and lower frequencies in temporal and abstract contexts. Chi-square tests confirmed that these differences are significant. However, the weak effect size (Cramér’s V = 0.109) suggests overlapping usage patterns between the two groups. These results highlight Korean learners’ tendency to overuse positional contexts, likely influenced by cross-linguistic interference and limited exposure to diverse usage contexts. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of prepositional usage in second language acquisition and provides practical implications for English language pedagogy.