While learners may have access to reference tools during second language (L2) writing, the latest developments in machine translation (MT), such as Google Translate requires examination as to how using the tool may factor into the second language learners’ writing products. To this end, the purpose of this study was to examine how MT may have an effect on L2 learners’ writing products relative to when writers wrote directly in L2, or translated a text to English from Korean. EFL university learners were asked to write for prompts that were counterbalanced for three writing modes and three writing topics. The learners’ writing products were analyzed with Coh-Metrix to provide information on text characteristics at the multilevel. The results indicate that MT could facilitate the learners to improve fluency and cohesion, produce syntactically complex sentences, and write concrete words to express their target messages. Pedagogical implications are provided for how MT can be used to improve the quality of the L2 learners’ writing products.

During reading instruction, sustaining learners’ reading motivation (RM) may be a challenge but a requisite when the goal is to keep learners reading. In the context of the present study, it was examined as to how RM may be sustained in a reading course. For this purpose, information on learners’ RM was collected in a semester-long university reading course with 118 Korean learners of English at the pre- and post-instructional stages of reading. RM was assessed with Motivations for Reading Questionnaire before and after reading instruction. Results indicated that reading involvement had decreased for all learners whereas the less skilled learners demonstrated an increase of reading efficacy and a drop in reading for grades. A linear multiple regression further indicated that reading efficacy was a significant predictor of reading proficiency only for the skilled learners. Implications are presented on how reading needs to be conducted by allowing learners to choose their own materials, which in turn may have an effect on developing more robust forms of RM.

The demand for test-taking has become an inevitable element of Korean secondary EFL learners’ academic lives in which learners strive to excel in the high-stakes examoriented milieu. However, current knowledge of practitioners, such as those of teachers and administrators, may be insufficient for ascertaining if the learners actually undergo the test-taking process they anticipate and assess what they aim to test. In contrast to the product-oriented view where the primary interest is on the outcome (i.e., scores or stanine levels), the purpose of the present study was to explore 165 Korean high school learners’ test-taking process via questionnaires with proficiency and item type as the grouping variables. There was avid use of conventional reading strategies among the high proficiency learners and test management strategies among the lower proficiency learners. Results present implications for teaching learners not only to become testwise, but also to work consistently towards building reading skills and adopt long-term learning strategies.

Although reading is part and parcel for the development of L2 literacy skills, such as in reading and writing, the skill has been practiced more often for grammar instruction and literal translation in EFL contexts. While realizing there is less focus on the development of L2 skills through extensive reading (ER) in EFL university contexts,the purpose of the present study was to explore the outcome of an in-class ER approach in English university classrooms. With 249 students, the study reports on the implementation of a university level ER class and the outcome for L2 development via the measures of L2 reading speed, L2 speed reading comprehension, and L2 lexical writing ability. Results indicated positive outcomes for the development of students’ L2reading ability, productive retrieval of academic words and lexical variety. The outcome of the ER program validates the effort and time expended on such programs when graded readers are utilized at matching student Lexile levels.

Lexical knowledge is an important predictor of second language learning. The present study focuses on aspects of lexical knowledge of Korean elementary (6'h grade) and middle school learners (9'h grade) in connection to learni ng strategies, that is, with regard to vocabulary learning and by investigating the learners' preferred English medium of interest. The learners were asked to complete questionnaires for information on vocabu lary learni ng strategies, and were tested with receptive and prod uctive vocabulalY levels test to assess their vocabulary knowledge. One-way ANOVA was conducted to note differences between the different vocabulary learning strategy groups, and multiple regression was employed to select predictors of learners' receptive and vocabulary knowledge. While the learners did not favor public education (school lessons), private lessons indicated to be the dominant means of learning English among the 6th graders with larger vocabu lalY sizes; the use of the vocabu lary workbook indicated to be a useful resource for the 9th graders. Although movies were popularly viewed by most of the learners, it was tile learners who had been reading books in Engli sh that seemed t.o have obtained larger vocabulary sizes. The findings provide guidelines for vocabulalY instruction in Korean elementary and middle school contexts .

The realization that there is a mismatch between the vocabulary level presented in the Korean National Curriculum, and the required vocabulary size for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) high school learners to take the high-stakes Korean College Scholastic Ability Test stimulated the researchers of the present study to administer an assessment of Korean high school learners’ vocabulary sizes. Measurement of vocabulary knowledge was conducted with the adaptation of Nation’s bilingual vocabulary size test, receptive and productive, by improving construct validity of the items. Learners were tested for the 1st ~ 10th 1,000 word bands to ascertain learners’ vocabulary size at each level. The assessment of vocabulary size demonstrated receptive vocabulary knowledge to be as large as 6,000 words. However, unforeseen rises in the EFL learners’ vocabulary sizes at some word bands were observed, which seem to have emerged from the educational milieu and the predominant focus on receptive lexical knowledge and the testing of them. Suggestions are proposed for the revision of word list of the National Curriculum, which would become the blueprint for controlling vocabulary level in the development of national textbooks of English.

The researchers’ experiential knowledge demonstrates that the task of predicting and controlling the difficulty level of the multiple-choice items of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) for English is substantially left to the subjective judgment of experienced item writers. The present study accordingly recognizes a need to identify item difficulty predictors and build an item difficulty prediction model to handle this pertinent issue. While taking separate interest in constructing a model for the multiplechoice reading subset of the CSAT, the study was conducted by identifying item difficulty predictor variables from previous research, and by validating the candidate predictors via questionnaires by highly experienced teacher-raters when asked to analyze reading items from the English reading subset of the preliminary CSAT (i.e., yun-hap-hak-ryuk-pyung-ga) administered in March 2009. Using multiple regression technique and maximum likelihood estimation, an item difficulty prediction model was generated. In order to check validity and applicability of the prediction model, the hypothetical model was finally tested on a subsequent version of the test administered in September 2009. This type of model building is expected to guide test developers design an item pool in accordance with special needs, such as to construct multiple test forms, which have similar mean difficulties.