With a recognition of a profound effect that teacher identity has in students’ language learning, the present study explores how teacher identity, especially that of native speaking (NS) and nonnative speaking (NNS) teacher in EFL context, shapes the teacher-student interaction and influences students’ learning differently. Data was gathered through classroom observations and video recordings of teacher-student interaction of a total of six hours of class sessions. The data comes from the interactions of three nonnative Korean teachers, one native speaker, and six university students in Korean EFL co-teaching classroom. To analyze the data, the method of discourse analysis was used. The findings show that the native teacher acted as an interaction provoker who stimulated classroom discussion and also an expert of both target language and culture. On the other hand, nonnative teachers acted as an activity guider by helping student understand the classroom activities. As sharing L1 and the same culture, nonnative teachers were flexible with the language choice of the students and understood the difficulties they had in the class. The study further draws attention to the pedagogical implications regarding the co-teaching of native and nonnative teacher in EFL classroom.

This study investigates how voice-chat conditions affect learners’ affective factors. In order to examine the effects of voice-chat conditions on Korean EFL learners’ attitudes towards English language learning and perceptions of voice-chat, 123 college students participated in this study. Participants were divided into two experimental groups: voice-chat with peers and voice-chat with robots. During the 16-experiment week, participants had a chat with either peers or robots. All participants in both voice-chat conditions showed positive attitudes towards English language learning and positive perceptions of voice-chat. Results indicate that both voice-chat conditions are effective in enhancing the learners’ confidence in English speaking, motivation to develop their English language skills, interests in English language learning, and beliefs in the improvement of their English speaking ability. In addition, engagement in voice-chat appears to help learners to reduce their stress and anxiety level. Findings suggest that EFL teachers integrate chat robots into their language teaching process.

The use of language learning strategies has been linked to effective EFL learning. However, while some researchers have suggested that good language learners use more strategies and more sophisticated strategies than less successful learners, others have disputed the unconditional nature of this view with the suggestion that factors such as task demands may affect the relationship between learner proficiency and strategy use. To examine the connection between language learning and learning strategy use the study examines the use of language learning strategies by 48 Korean university students from elementary school to university. In addition, emotional intelligence is investigated with regard to its impact on strategy use. The results bolster claims that associate greater and more sophisticated strategy use with more successful learners. In addition, the results highlight the importance of encouraging learning strategy use at early educational levels and the influence of emotional intelligence on the use of particular strategy types.

The purpose of this study is two-fold: (1) to find context-specific motivational factors in Korean college contexts within the framework of Gardner’s integrativeness and Dörnyei’s (2005, 2009) L2 Motivational Self System; (2) to examine how those motivational factors explain motivated behavior. For this purpose, motivation data by 787 students was analyzed. The factor analysis revealed eight factors in Korean context: promotional instrumentality, bad learning experience, ought-to L2 self, integrativeness, elusive ideal L2 self, ethnocentrism, intercultural avoidance, and international posture. The regression analysis showed that four motivational factors, bad learning experience, ought-to L2 self, elusive ideal L2 self, and promotional instrumentality, significantly explained the participants’ motivated behavior. The findings indicate that there existed context-specific motivational factors which could better explain success of L2 in Korean EFL college contexts. The theoretical and pedagogical implications were provided at the conclusion.

This study examined the use of conjunctions in Korean high school EFL learners’ writings in two discourse modes–description and argument. A corpus of seventy-six descriptive essays and eighty argumentative essays was developed, in which the essays were rated based on their cohesiveness and divided into three groups by their grades. Conjunctions were analyzed based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) framework: additive, adversative, causal, and temporal conjunctions. The results revealed different trends of using conjunctions in the two different discourse modes. The descriptive writings with high scores on cohesion tend to exhibit more conjunctions when compared to lower-quality writings, and the argumentative writings with high scores showed fewer conjunctions. The high-quality writings in descriptive mode showed highly frequent uses of additives and adversatives, while those in argumentative mode displayed a lower frequency of additives and a more frequent use of adversative however. Small numbers of causal and temporal conjunctions were used in both discourse modes, and they were particularly limited in descriptive writings regardless of the cohesiveness of writings. This implies that more explicit instructions on causal and temporal conjunctions for each mode are needed in the writing classes. In addition, the scores on cohesion were significantly lower for the descriptive essays than for the argumentative essays, and a much narrower range of conjunctions was employed in descriptive writing. These results suggest a more balanced focus on various discourse modes of writing and the introduction of conjunctions that are appropriate for each mode, since the ability to use conjunctions in one mode does not seem to be automatically transferred to another mode in high school EFL learners’ writings.

Conventional expressions are considered an important area of study informing L2 pragmatics and inter-language pragmatics. This study investigates the differences between native English speakers’ and Korean EFL speakers’ productions of conventional expressions by employing an audio-visual production task (adapted from Bardovi-Harlig, 2009). Results show that EFL students statistically differ from their native speaker counterparts in about half of the scenarios involving the production of conventional expressions. While EFL learner productions were often grammatical and appropriate, they also displayed pragma-linguistically infelicitous utterances (e.g., I’m just looking out.) and more verbosity compared to their NS counterparts. Certain scenes including giving and deflecting thanks delivered less target-like expressions, which may lead to communicative failure in real time interaction. Pedagogical implications of this type of study are also discussed.

This paper adopts a multi-factorial analysis and investigates English dative alternations in Korean EFL learners’ writings, by directly comparing dative alternations of native speakers and those of Korean EFL learners’ writings. Two corpora were chosen for the comparison: the Switchboard corpus (written sections) and the Korean component of the TOEFL11 corpus. After all the sentences with dative alternations were extracted from these two corpora, and seventeen linguistic factors were manually encoded, the data were statistically analyzed in R. This paper was theoretically based on the concept of interlanguage in the Second Language Acquisition and Competition Model of Bates and MacWhinney (1982, 1989). Through the analysis, the following facts were observed: (i) the Korean EFL learners used ditransitive constructions more frequently than prepositional constructions, (ii) eight main factors and four interactions with the L1 were statistically significant, and (iii) the ditransitive constructions which the Korean EFL learners used were closer to the prepositional constructions rather than the ditransitive constructions in Korean.

This study aims to investigate the effects of semantic clustering on Korean secondary school students’ English vocabulary learning. The present study was conducted with 56 secondary school students in South Korea. In order to determine if and how semantic clustering affects second language learners, the participants were divided into two groups: a semantically related (SR) word group and a semantically unrelated (SU) word group. The two comparison groups were taught the same 25 vocabulary items in different clusters (SR vs. SU). In the experiment, vocabulary test scores were gathered and analyzed three times: on a pre-, post-, and delayed-test. In the results, scores from the SU word group significantly outperformed the SR word group on the post-test, but on the delayed-test. Findings suggest that presenting new L2 words in SU sets is more effective than SR sets in the short term with Korean EFL secondary school students.

Metadiscourse has been recognized as an important aspect of effective persuasive discourse. In this study, we explore how metadiscourse features are deployed by 34 EFL undergraduate students to make their non-discipline persuasive texts effective. We find that students grasp at least some of the metadiscourse resources available to them, but are relatively limited in rhetorical sophistication. In fact, transitions, frame markers, code glosses and hedges were found to be critical elements contributing to student writing quality. The findings also show that both frequency and diversity of frame markers are positive predictors of overall writing quality. We also investigate the linguistic forms of metadiscourse used by the students to project stance in their writing. The students were found to have difficulty handling the range of stance construction they could take, and this was unfortunately couched in single-word modal verbs. Teachers should make the metadiscourse features of persuasive writing explicit to students to assist them in making stronger arguments.

The present study was designed to examine the effects of a variety of factors on English vocabulary achievement. To this end, a total of seven hypotheses were posed in light of previous research on vocabulary learning. To test these hypotheses, an SEM procedure was performed for a sample of 368 Korean university students. The effects of gender and academic specialization on English vocabulary achievement were also examined through multi-sample analyses. Results of the present study demonstrate that Korean university EFL learners’ English vocabulary achievement was a direct function of motivation and vocabulary strategy. The effects of confidence, learner beliefs, and vocabulary learning methods, however, were found to be only indirectly connected to vocabulary achievement through motivation and strategy use. The results of multisample analyses for learners of different gender and academic major groups identified a total of four path coefficients whose effects functioned differentially across different learner groups. Implications of the present are also discussed.

With the advent of technology, telecollaborative projects have emerged that enable learners to interact with native speakers of the target language, helping them to improve both language proficiency and intercultural communicative competence (ICC). One long-lasting project is Cultura, which has been successful because of its pedagogical qualities, such as a task-based approach and collaborative learning (Furstenberg & Levet, 2014). In this study, a Cultura-inspired project was designed to foster interaction between students of Korean as a foreign language (KFL) residing in Australia and students of English as a foreign language (EFL) residing in Korea. ‘Facebook’ was used for asynchronous communication, and ‘Kakao Talk’ and ‘Facebook’ messenger were used for synchronous online chat. In order to suggest a model for designing and practicing future intercultural projects, this study focused on demonstrating the procedures for each task and examining evidence of ICC in the students’ interactions, as represented in speech acts. This study also investigated the students’ experience of the project, using surveys and interviews. The findings suggest that the students showed limited knowledge of their target culture in a word-association task on Facebook, but that their online interactions provided evidence of ICC, for example curiosity, and reflection on their own culture. Most of the students enjoyed the project, especially the online chat. However, the participants mentioned issues, such as the limited number of online interactions and lack of in-class discussions. For future practice, the use of various modes of communication and the desirability of balancing proficiency levels in the target language are discussed.

This study reports on the findings of error analysis of a learner corpus consisting of 238 English argumentative essays written by Korean college students, specifically on errors that stem from confusion of lexical categories. A three-step error analysis was conducted following a procedure established by Rod Ellis in 1995. The results revealed 10 commonly confused lexical category dyads—coordinators or subordinators mistaken for adverbs, adverbs for conjunctions, gerunds for nouns, the adverb almost for either an adjective or a noun, the pronoun each other for an adverb, adverbs for nouns, conjunctions for prepositions, prepositions for conjunctions, the preposition to for an infinitive, and the adverbial for example for a preposition. Discussions of the causes of such confusion—homogeneous L1 translation, failure to correctly punctuate spoken language in writing, lack of L2 grammar knowledge, negative transfer of L1 morphosyntactic properties, and lack of L2 lexical knowledge—are delineated with specific examples. The limitations of the study and pedagogical implications are addressed.

The purpose of this study was to explore how motivational factors affect Korean EFL secondary students’ motivated learning behavior using structural equation modeling (SEM). It further examined differences in the internal structure of L2 motivation over time. A total of 489 secondary school students participated in the study. Data were collected at two time points during an academic semester: in the beginning and at the end of the semester. Results of the SEM showed that students’ ideal L2 self was the strongest determinant of their motivated learning behavior at both time points for middle school students, whereas for high school students, ought-to L2 self had the strongest direct and significant impact on their motivated behavior in learning English throughout the semester. It was also found that both middle and high school students’ perceptions about the international posture of English and their parents’ involvement in English learning made indirect effects on their motivated behavior. Pedagogical implications and research suggestions are discussed.

Laufer, Elder, Hill, and Congdon (2004) proposed the vocabulary strength framework reflecting the process of vocabulary knowledge development with a hierarchical order of four strength modalities: passive recognition, active recognition, passive recall, and active recall. Employing this framework, the present study aims to empirically examine its generalizability to EFL contexts and further explore its availability to validating the TEPS vocabulary section. Three sets of web-based tests for three proficiency groups (beginner (n=37), intermediate (n=31), and advanced (n=30)) are developed with words from three frequency bands (3000, 5000, and 7000). The test includes four sections representing four strength modes and an optional TEPS section for the two upper groups. A one-parameter Rasch model analysis reveals that item difficulties agree to the hierarchical sequence of difficulty order in the framework. Different vocabulary growth rates were found across modes and word bands. The TEPS item difficulties that are closer to recall than recognition may give a theoretical account of the measuring construct that the TEPS items tap upon.

This study investigated L2 production, perception, and the relation of production and perception by examining 20 Korean learners’ production and perception of the English contrasts of /ʃ/ vs. /ʃi/, /ʧ/ vs. /ʧi/, and /ʤ/ vs. /ʤi/ in word final position. Of the 20 Korean learners, 10 (5 males, 5 females) were low in English proficiency and the other 10 (5 males, 5 females) were high. Our findings from production and perception experiments showed that the relation of L2 production and perception varies according to learners’ proficiency levels in L2. A significant correlation between L2 production and perception was attested within the high group learners. Thus, the high group learners with higher production accuracy generally exhibited higher perception accuracy. Unlike the high group, the low group learners’ production and perception patterns did not show any significant correlation between the two. In general, the low group displayed higher accuracy in production than in perception. In addition, within the low group, the heavy influence of L1 constraints on L2 perception was attested while L2 production was not in accordance with L1 phonology.

This study adopts a flow theory perspective to investigate the learning engagement levels of 224 Korean high school students during EFL classes and the factors that may relate to differences in their engagement. Engagement was defined as the simultaneous experience of concentration, interest, and enjoyment. The experience sampling method was employed to measure 10th and 11th graders’ appraisals of instructional activities. Each participant was sampled twice randomly during each of three observed lessons. Momentary levels of engagement were examined in relation to students’ appraisals of activity qualities (importance for future goals, difficulty, possessed skills/competence in the area of the activity), and contextual factors (gender, grade, teacher, ability-track). Descriptive analyses, ANOVAs, and t-tests revealed that only 13% of the students were optimally engaged in lessons that were predominantly teacher-centered; increased engagement was associated with students’ appraisals of activity importance for future goals and with feelings of competence; and learner group engagement differed according to who taught them. Some teachers seemed to use an approach more conducive to engagement.

The purpose of this study was to study how L2 motivations in both Dörnyei’s (2005, 2009) L2 Motivational Self System and Gardner’s (1985) socio-educational model were related to intrinsic and extrinsic subscales in the self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) in Korean college contexts. This study investigated the relationships among the motivational variables by the use of the correlation method and the effects of L2 motivations on motivated behavior through multiple regression analysis. The findings showed Gardner’s (1985) integrativeness and ideal L2 self were strongly correlated with the more self-determined types of motivations, while L2 learning experience and ought-to L2 self were associated with the less self-determined ones in the self-determination theory. In addition, Dörnyei’s (2005, 2009) L2 Motivational Self System and the extrinsic motivation subscales, identified regulation and external regulation, explained Korean college students’ motivated behavior better than Gardner’s (1985) integrativeness. The theoretic discussions are made at the conclusion.

This paper reviews ELT materials-related articles published in English Teaching, the journal ofthe Korea Association of Teachers ofEnglish (KATE), from 1965 to 2015. The paper builds on and expands S-H. Lee (2006) which reviewed ELT materialsrelated articles in English Teaching from 1965 to 2006. A research synthesis on a total of 71 ELT materials-related articles was conducted. The characteristics of the articles and how the Korean educational context affects ELT materials-related research were investigated. The results of the analysis show that there is a steady flow of ELT materials-related articles being published. The topic that was dealt with the most was the organization and structure of the material. The majority of the articles focus on government-sanctioned textbooks. In addition, changes to the National Curriculum of Korea seem to affect the content and timeliness of the articles as the number of articles related to textbooks increases immediately after new textbooks are published. Lastly, implications for English Teaching in terms of publishing and disseminating ELT materials-related articles are discussed.