This study investigated the impact of 26 EFL college students’ familiarity levels with the visual information of TOEIC listening test items on test scores and test performance procedure. Data collected measured students’ degree of familiarity with the visuals via a pre-test and their listening test scores, and responses to the post-test questionnaire were analyzed. To analyze the data, one-way ANOVA was conducted to locate the interdependency between the students’ familiarity levels with visuals and their test scores. Results found that there was no statistically significant differences in test scores regardless of the students’ levels of familiarity with the visuals. Additionally, the correlations between the familiarity with the visuals and the students’ test scores were low. However, the students experienced difficulties with unfamiliar visuals while taking the test. These findings indicate that, although test-takers’ familiarity with visuals does not predict their listening test scores, there is a need to tailor the visuals when developing listening test-items.

Advertisement allows for multimodal access to sounds, colors, picture animations, and diverse symbols. Little research has reported the interrelationship among multimodality, discursive practice, and media effects in English language education. This study aims to conduct a multimodal approach to discourse analysis on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) in TV advertisements and to explore the unique significance of the research methodology. The multimodality in three TV Ads (A, B, C) was investigated by referring to Halliday's systemic functional grammar, social semiotics’ visual grammar, and typography’s distinctive features. Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity was also employed as an analytic framework for the collected multimodal data from three domains (representational, interpersonal, and textual/compositional) of meaning-making schemes. It was found that different modes (language, typography, visual image) acted complementarily and efficiently to deliver the message of TOEIC: problem-solving ‘skill’ in A, financial 'support and return’ in B, and ‘AI database’ in C. Further research is also discussed, especially with regard to ‘critical’ approaches to multimodal discourse studies.

This case study investigated the changes of four Korean English major college students’ motivation and interest in TOEIC studying based on qualitative research method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted once a month for six months. Interest is a unique motivational variable with affective and cognitive domains together including interactions between persons and their objects wheres motivation is more broad, psychological and overlapping concept compared with interest. The results showed that the participants expressed the strong instrumental and extrinsic motivation for TOEIC studying while they confessed the intrinsic motivation for English learning. However, some participants had both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation on TOEIC studying as time went by. The participants’ strong perceptions on TOEIC in Korea were strongly related with situational interest in TOEIC or TOEIC studying. The participants’ interest in TOEIC studying was triggered as they improved the TOEIC score. However, one participant showed the expiration of interest in TOEIC studying right after achieving a high TOEIC score, but his interest in potential English studying was triggered.

The study aims to look into linguistic differences of essays among different scoring groups depending on TOEIC scores. In order to investigate such research questions, the Gachon Learner Corpus collected from over 25,000 essays was used. Each essay was classified into 5 different scoring groups. Statistical results were extracted based on 22 linguistic features using open-source natural language processing tools. Unlike the micro-oriented features of Crossley, Kyle, Allen, Guo and McNamara (2014), macro-oriented features were used. Since micro-feature approach needs more features than macro-feature one does, micro-feature based approach is more efficient in feature extraction process. The current study’s observation revealed that the statistically observed behaviors were varied among different scoring groups. Higher scoring groups had different strategies in language use when showing higher linguistic abilities, compared with those of lower scoring groups. Unlike the observation in Cumming, Kantor, Baba, Eouanzoui, Erdosy, and James (2016), the linguistic complexity feature(s) like syntactic complexity was not clearly distinctive between lower and higher scoring groups.