The present study examines the effects of schema activation and reading strategy use on L2 learners’ reading comprehension, strategy use, motivation, and learner beliefs. The participants consisted of 89 Korean college students, and they were assigned to one of two reading activity groups―schema building or reading strategy instruction―or to a control group. The study employed a background questionnaire, pre-, post-, and delayed English reading comprehension tests, and also pre- and post-reading strategy use, reading motivation, and general learner belief questionnaires. The results indicate that both the schema building and reading strategy task groups showed significant improvements in terms of immediate learning effects, but the reading strategy group showed an added degree of improvement over the schema building and control groups in terms of long-term reading comprehension. Additionally, the two task groups reported positive responses to their own use of reading strategies, motivation, and positive beliefs. Based on the findings, this study suggests pedagogical implications for L2 reading classrooms.

This study explored the effects of creativity-based L2 poem writing (CBLPW) for EFL college students. A total of 40 college students participated, who were assigned to two conditions-non-creativity and creativity groups. The present study employed pre-, post-, and delayed-tests for creativity using the Torrance Test of Creativity, pre-, post-, and delayed-evaluations of L2 poem writing quality, and pre- and post-questionnaires for participants' affective domain. The results showed immediate and sustained effects of CBLPW on creativity, and writing quality. In addition, an overall positive effect of CBLPW was observed in the affective domain such as interests, confidence, and motivation for the two groups. These findings suggest that teachers could offer students a wide range of creativity techniques in order to enhance their levels of creativity, L2 poem writing quality, and the affective domain of learners.

The goal of this study is to better understand the attitudes of students towards pronunciation in order to better evaluate the current university curriculum, as well as to make recommendations on how to improve the quality of education for students of English in South Korea. A total of fifty-five students were given both a questionnaire and a short interview which were utilized for the present study. The results demonstrate that the students agree pronunciation is important in English, and they wish to sound like a native speaker. It was also found that students are slightly worried about their own English accent, however they have not had much instruction on pronunciation. In addition, the participants of the study appeared to be more concerned with their accents, rather than comprehensibility or intelligibility. The most widely preferred accent by the participants was American accent followed by British accent. Although the participants acknowledged the importance of pronunciation or accent in English, they were reluctant to receive a class focusing on pronunciation. Based on the findings we suggest that there should be more collaboration between native and non-native speakers of English in Korea. Furthermore, we recommend that Korean students be exposed to more varieties of World Englishes through the integration of students from other countries into the classroom as well as conducted a class on World Englishes.

Articles in one domestic journal, English Teaching (ET), and one international journal, TESOL Quarterly (TQ) from 2011 to 2013 were surveyed in order to analyze current research trends and to suggest better orientation toward future research focusing on participants, research methods, target language skills, and research topics. The results show that university students have participated most in both of the journal articles, indicating that they are practically available to the researchers in higher educational settings. The proportion of quantitative and qualitative research methods was well balanced in TQ, while, in ET, more than 50 percent of the articles relied on quantitative research methodology along with a relatively larger proportion of mixed method research in ET. In terms of target language skills, writing has been studied most in ET and speaking in TQ, showing growing interest in productive language skills nowadays. As for research topics, articles based on socio-cultural factors have been published most in TQ and articles based on classrooms pedagogy in ET, which reflects that English learning is performed mostly in classroom settings in Korea. Pedagogical implications and suggestions are made based on the findings

Despite a large amount of research on reading, little attention has been paid to experimental studies on the effects of purposeful reading. This study explored the effects of reading purpose on reading comprehension and perceived difficulty. 71 high school students participated in this study and were randomly assigned to three groups – graphic organizer (Purpose 1), key sentence (Purpose 2), and control. The learners’ reading comprehension was measured through pre-, post- and delayed tests. The participants’ perceived difficulty for the texts was also checked with a sevenpoint Likert scale. The result demonstrates no immediate effect of establishing reading purpose, though immediate reading purpose effects might be found if a longer treatment period is set. The results also reveal the sustained effect of reading purpose on reading comprehension. In perceived text difficulty, the Purpose 1 group found the reading passages the easiest among the three groups. This suggests that learners establishing a reading purpose can gain greater ease in reading than those without a reading purpose.

This article compares recent topical and methodological trends in second language research published in two domestic (English Teaching and Modern English Education)and two international journals (Language Learning and The Modern Language Journal) from 2007 to 2012. The journals were selected in consideration of the extent to which the area of language teaching and learning is given prominence, impact factors at the time of data collection, and comparability in the total number of articles during the period. A total of 867 articles were analyzed by two raters cooperatively in terms of data collection/analysis methods, target language skills, and research themes. Results reveal that there has been a significant change in domestic research over the past six years when compared to surveys before 2007. Overall, with some emerging region-specific issues and orientations, researchers in Korea seem to have embraced a greater diversity of topics and methods that are comparable to the international trends.

This study analyzed the text readability of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) and High School English Ⅱ textbooks by focusing on reading and compared the difficulty levels between them. To analyze the readability, the Flesh 2.0 for Windows and the Web VP 1.5 (2003) were used. To find out about high school students’ attitudes and behavior towards English and their preferences of English books, a questionnaire consisting of ten questions was administered. The results revealed that the textbooks are more readable than the CSATs in terms of the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level (RGL) and Reading Ease Score (RES). The average length per sentence of the textbooks is shorter than that of the CSATs. Furthermore, the CSATs have a higher percent of academic words than the textbooks. The questionnaire results showed that the participants, 228 second-year high school boy and girl students, preferred CSAT prep books, followed by EBS books and textbooks. Based on the findings, the basic directions of the CSAT and the guidelines to write textbooks have been suggested.

This study examined whether explicit or implicit teaching is more efficient in improving Korean middle school students’ English verb−noun collocation knowledge. Forty Korean EFL middle school students participated in the study and they were assigned to either the explicit instruction or implicit instruction group. The participants’ English verb−noun collocation knowledge was measured through pre-, immediate post-, and delayed post-tests over the 5- week experimental period, and a survey of participants’ opinions on the instruction they received was carried out. The results showed that the students who received the explicit collocation instruction displayed better learning outcomes, suggesting the immediate influence of the explicit instruction, and more importantly the sustained initial advantage. That is, the explicit group students did retain the target items significantly better than the implicit group students. The responses from the two groups also indicated the positive effects of the explicit collocation instruction. The explicit group students were mostly satisfied with the instruction and showed increased confidence in acquiring English collocations while the implicit students did not. This study provides L2 teachers with valuable information on how to teach L2 collocation more effectively.

This study investigated which type of corrective feedback, direct feedback or indirect feedback, would be more effective for reducing the targeted errors−verb, noun, and determiner errors−in L2 writing. The 20 Korean EFL college students were divided into two feedback conditions: direct feedback and indirect coded feedback. The results of the study showed that only the errors in the noun category, not the other two categories, showed a significant decrease over time. There were no significant differences in the effect of the differential feedback. The post surveys and interviews revealed that the students in both groups had difficulty in understanding their errors and feedback on them, and they wanted to receive a more detailed explanation about their errors in order to fully understand them. The overall findings indicate that different types of corrective feedback need to be combined with other methods such as a one-to-one conference or mini-lesson for further helping students understand their errors and reduce other errors in the future. This study provides L2 teachers with valuable information on how to respond more effectively to the needs of L2 learners.

We have determined the complete mitochondrial genome of the yellow-spotted long horned beetle, Psacothea hilaris (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae), an endangered insect species in Korea. The 15,856-bp long P. hilaris mitogenome harbors gene content typical of the animal mitogenome and a gene arrangement identical to the most common type found in insect mitogenomes. As with all other sequenced coleopteran species, the 5-bp long TAGTA motif was also detected in the intergenic space sequence located between tRNASer (UCN) and ND1 of P. hilaris. The 1,190-bp long non-coding A+T-rich region harbors an unusual series of seven identical repeat sequences of 57-bp in length and several stretches of sequences with the potential to form stem-and-loop structures. Furthermore, it contains one tRNAArg-like sequence and one tRNALys-likes equence. Phylogenetic analysis among available coleopteran mitogenomes using the concatenated amino acid sequences of PCGs appear to support the sister group relationship of the suborder Polyphaga to all remaining suborders, including Adephaga, Myxophaga, and Archostemata. Among the two available infraorders in Polyphaga, a monophyletic Cucujiformia was confirmed, with the placement of Cleroidea as the basal lineage for Cucujiformia. On the other hand, the infraorder Elateriformia was not identified as monophyletic, thereby indicating that Scirtoidea and Buprestoidea are the basal lineages for Cucujiformia and the remaining Elateriformia.