With the advent of mobile technology, teaching and learning have been more effective with the help of smartphone education applications. This study investigates the effects of vocabulary learning using the smartphone education applications on Korean elementary school learners’ English vocabulary learning and attitudes. A total of fifty-seven elementary school students in the 5th grade participated in the study and were randomly divided into an experimental and a control group. The results of the study manifested that both the experimental and control group showed an increase in the comprehension and production score from pre- to post-tests. The effects of the long-term vocabulary learning, however, were not found to be statistically significant. The average score in the delayed test for both groups slightly increased, which indicated that the treatment was beneficial for learners’ long-term memory enhancement. In the affective domain, interests and confidence ratings were significant for the upper-level experimental and lower-level control group. The results of the survey questionnaire showed that the vocabulary learning using direct examples and pictures for both groups was helpful to improve learners’ lexical competence.

The present study explored usage patterns of English coordinating conjunctions(CCs) in Korean EFL learners' and native English speakers' written corpus. Focusing on the morpho-syntactic use and cohesive functions of and, but, or and so as focal examples in academic prose, both quantitative and qualitative analyses were employed. Findings from the quantitative analysis of the opinion essays showed that both groups used and most frequently, which is used mostly in word/phrase levels rather than in clause levels. On the other hand, so is especially used as a clause-level CC. Because or and and used most frequently in word/phrase levels are recognized easily as CCs, they rarely appear in a sentence-initial position. By contrast, so and but used more often in a clause level appear in a sentence-initial position more frequently, which may lead L2 learners to confuse CCs with connective adverbials(CAs). Based on the Subset Principle, it may be interpreted that morpho-syntactic properties on CAs in Korean transfer to those on English CCs due to the morpho-lexical difference of CCs between the two languages. However, this study reveals that the L1 transfer seems to gradually retreat at an intermediate level where L2 learners start to perceive the registers of academic prose.

The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of good English teachers’ characteristics and to suggest guidelines for how to be a good English teacher by conducting a survey questionnaire to middle and high school students and their English teachers in Korea. The survey was composed of 48 items regarding teaching skills, personality and creativity, and assessing skills. The results showed there are different perceptions about the characteristics of good English teachers between teachers and students. Teachers perceived checking students’ understanding during the class as the most important characteristic followed by giving appropriate feedback to students, while students perceived treating them respectfully as the most important one. According to the research findings, this study suggests that English teachers should carefully consider developing students’ affective and creative aspects as well as linguistic skills that were shown to be important in both teacher and student perceptions. It also suggests the curriculum developers and teacher trainers for English teachers should continuously monitor the teacher evaluation process and apply the findings as helpful guidelines for future research and practice.

The purpose of this study is to investigate paths of the effects of L2 motivational self system and self-efficacy on Korean EFL learners’ English ability. For this purpose, questionnaires were conducted and 580 Korean elementary school students in Gyeonggido participated in this survey. Correlation and path analysis were used to analyze the data. The major results of the study are as follows: (1) Self-efficacy is correlated with all constructs of motivation. It has the highest correlation with ideal L2 self and the lowest correlation with ought-to L2 self; (2) self-efficacy has a direct effect on ideal L2 self and ought-to L2 self whereas it has direct and indirect effects on elementary students’ English proficiency; and (3) ought-to L2 self has a positive direct effect and L2 learning experience has a negative direct effect on elementary students’ English proficiency. However, ideal L2 self has no effect on elementary students’ English proficiency. At the end of the paper, pedagogical implications and suggestions are discussed.

The present study investigates English teachers’ needs in relation to competency-enhancing in-service teacher training program. Two different surveys were conducted with English teachers in three school levels from primary to high school. The first survey consisted of an open-ended question to collect unstructured responses from teachers. The second survey was constructed based on the analysis of the first survey. A total of 1,111 teachers participated in the study (124 for the first survey, 987 for the second survey). The survey results are as follows: The needs analysis survey consisted of six factors that are English proficiency (five items), school curriculum (four items), teaching methodology (seven items), contents of teaching (six items), value (three items), and method for teacher training (six items). Second, there were statistically significant differences according to three school levels and years of teaching experience. This result suggests that more attention needs to be paid to different needs of English teachers so as to develop effective competency-enhancing English teacher training program. Pedagogical implications have been discussed.

Choi, Jin-sook. 2017. “International Students' Attitude Changes towards English as per their Korean skills”. The Sociolinguistics of Korea Journal 25(3). 327~349. This study aims at identifying the international students' attitudes towards English change as per their Korean skills after learning English over one semester. Sixty international students, who consisted of three groups as per their Korean skills, participated in the questionnaire survey at the beginning stage of the class. After one semester, the same questionnaire was given to the participants. Two questionnaire surveys showed similar results: the participants with a higher level of Korean skills demonstrated more favorable attitudes towards English and were less fearful in learning English, compared to those with a lower level of Korean skills. The attitude changes were also different as per the Korean skills: when compared to the attitudes at the beginning, while the participants with a higher level of Korean skills changed more favorably towards learning English, the participants with a lower level of Korean skills showed no attitude changes or picked up less favorable attitudes, and their fear about learning English rather increased. This study implies that English learning may improve English skills for the international students with a higher level of Korean skills but does not affect those with a lower level of Korean skills.

The present study examines the features of communicative functions in middle school English textbooks, identifying whether or not they are presented based on the spiral structure. It also compares the communicative functions of 15 different middle school English textbooks and investigates whether the National English Listening Tests (NELTs) reflect the communicative functions presented in the textbooks. Two corpora were compiled using the 15 middle school English textbooks and the NELTs, and they were analyzed using WordSmith Tools. The results show that all the textbooks included communicative functions that the National Curriculum recommends; however, the textbooks presented a limited number of functions. Nonetheless, the communicative functions were presented relatively in a spiral way. The majority number of communicative functions in the textbooks and the NELTs were similar to each other, but there were some functions in the tests that were not covered in the textbooks. These results imply that more diverse communicative functions should be included in textbooks in order to help improve students’ communicative competence. The communicative functions not presented in the textbooks should not be included in the NELTs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean college students’ syntactic development, especially the order of acquisition in terms of the types of the sentences and clauses written in English essays. Eighty-six Korean female college students in Seoul participated in this study. For research method, the students wrote English essays with the given topic through the test web site. The essays were scored on a scale of one to six., and then were divided into three proficiency groups. After that, the students’ essays were analyzed and counted by types of sentences/clauses and frequency: simple/compound/complex sentences and nominal/adverbial/adjective clauses. The findings revealed significant differences in the frequency of different types of clauses by students’ English levels. The results showed that the amount of sentences/clauses based on the level of English proficiency was quite different. In particular, significant differences were found in the use of the complex sentences and subordinate clauses by levels. In addition, the use of adjective (relative) clauses was prominent only in the advanced level. Teaching implications were discussed and future research suggestions were made at the end of the paper.

Effects of primary English education using children’s literature have been extensively examined by many researchers in Korea during the past about two decades. This study aims to delineate the research domain by employing a meta-analysis of 31 primary studies that have been published in Korean refereed journals by February 2017. From the primary studies, 41 effects sizes were calculated based on the contrast of the means of two groups and 152 pre-to-post effect sizes based on the contrast of pretest and posttest scores. The results indicate that primary English education using children’s literature had overall a medium-sized effect (g = .60), with its effect being greater in the affective domain (g = .93) than in the cognitive domain (g = .37). More specifically, it was found that introducing children’s literature in the elementary English classrooms would bring about positive learning effects in the areas of vocabulary and reading and would be effective to develop positive learner interest and attitudes toward English learning. The results and their implications are further discussed.

Morphological competence plays an important role in extending one’s vocabulary in grammatical context. This study is to explore the developmental distribution of English grammatical morphemes appearing in elementary English textbooks. To this end, the study developed grammatical morpheme recognition and elicitation tests based on the bilingual syntax measurement (BSM). The tests are given to 114 fifth graders and 126 sixth graders across small, medium and metropolitan cities. The students were stratified into high, mid and low English ability groups by their English achievement scores. The result shows that English grammatical morpheme awareness was positively correlated with students’ English ability. The grammatical morphological development of Korean students was more in alignment with that of English learners as a foreign language than that of native speakers. Pedagogical implications are provided at the end of the paper.

Teachers’ job satisfaction is a crucial factor to determine the quality of education in that it affects their dedication and participation. While teachers’ job satisfaction in general has been widely investigated, subject-related job satisfaction has been sparsely explored. Thus, this study investiaged both general and subject-related job satisfaction and compared them. A total of 117 secondary English teachers in Seoul participated in a survey which measures job satisfaction in terms of seven factors: relationship with people, job duties, work environments, opportunities for professional development, compensations, administration systems, and recognitions. Overall, the participants showed a modest level of satisfaction in both general and subjet-related jobs. Yet, subject-related job satisfaction was higher than general job satisfaction. They were particularly satisfied with their relationship with students and teachers. They also showed high satisfaction with recognition they receive as a teacher as well as an English teacher. In contrast, they were dissatisfied with compensations and workloads in general, and the number of students in charge and administrative support in teaching English. Finally, their job satisfaction was affected by gender, school type, position, and marriage. Based on the results, suggestions to enhance secondary English teachers’ job satisfaction were made.

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.

As a preliminary study for the effective development of a genre-focused English learner corpus, this article aims to investigate most frequent error types and their frequencies in English emails written by undergraduate freshmen in South Korea. Data for this study include English emails of 86 Korean students majoring in humanities or social science in a university located in Daegu. With the rise of Internet, ESL/EFL education has witnessed a growing interest in teaching email usage in composition courses, as it provides a variety of opportunities to evaluate language abilities including interpersonal and pragmatic abilities. The present article revealed that the most frequent error type was concerned with style, such as capitalization (28.7%) and punctuation (7.8%), which was followed by determiner deletion (6.3%), genre convention such as closing (3%), countability of nouns (3%), and verb choice (2.7%). Different error types and frequencies were identified according to different English proficiency levels (Korean SAT and TOEIC), which evidenced the need to include the English proficiency level annotation in the corpus design and to focus on different types of errors in class in accordance with learners’ proficiency levels.

본 연구는 근거이론 관점에서 유아대상 영어학원의 선택결정요인을 학부모와 학원장의 심층면접을 통 한 연구결과를 토대로, 교육적․정책적 시사점을 제시하기 위한 것이다. 이를 위하여 본 연구는 4단계의 과 정을 거쳐 10명의 연구 참여자를 최종적으로 선정한 후, 자료 수집을 위해 심층면담을 실시하였다. 심층 면담을 통해 수집된 자료는 Strauss와 Corbin(1998)이 제시한 근거이론 방식에 의해 개방코딩-축코딩- 선택코딩의 순으로 진행하였다. 분석결과, 중심현상은 자녀의 차별화된 성장에 대한 갈망이었다. 이의 인과적 조건, 맥락적 조건, 중재적 조건 등을 살펴보면서, 유아대상 영어학원 선택 결정요인에 대한 패러다임 모형을 제시하였다. 이상의 결과를 토대로, 유아대상 공교육 정책수립, 강사의 자질, 교습시간, 조기 공교육 영어교육정책의 시사점, 유아대상 영어학원의 분당 수강료 측면에서 함의를 제고시킬 수 있는 방안을 제시하였다.

Choi, Jin-sook. 2017. “A Study on Attitudes toward English among Chinese Students”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(1). 239~262. This study sets out to investigate the Chinese students' attitudes toward English and how their attitudes towards English are different as to the level of their Korean skills. For this study, 68 Chinese students participated in the questionnaire survey and 6 students with high level of Korean were interviewed as a group by the researcher. The result of the quantitative study indicates that the participants' attitudes toward English were generally positive. When the level of self-perceived Korean skills was applied to their attitudes towards English as a variable, the participants who had a high level of self-perceived Korean skills produced higher interest in learning English and more favorable attitudes towards English speakers than those who had a low level of self-perceived Korean skills. And the Pearson’s correlation analysis confirmed the relationship between these two factors: self-perceived Korean skills and attitudes toward English. The result of the focus group interview also supported the quantitative study: the participants who had a high level of Korean favored English and they were interested in English. Therefore, this study suggests that English learning could be applied only for the Chinese students who have a high level of Korean skills for the effectiveness of their studying in Korea.

This study explores whether there are differences in the types and characteristics of teacher talk between primary English teachers with different degrees of teaching professionalism. Two primary English teachers who were different from each other in their teaching professionalism were selected. They both taught sixth grade students and used the same English textbook. The data for the study were collected while they both were teaching the same unit of the textbook. Their classes were video-recorded and their interaction was transcribed and analyzed based on the framework of ‘constructive’ and ‘obstructive’ teacher talk (Walsh, 2002). The results show that the two teachers differed in the amount of the use of ‘constructive’ and ‘obstructive’ teacher talk. The more professional teacher used more constructive talk while the less professional teacher used more obstructive talk, and the more professional teacher encouraged the students to engage in the interaction by using constructive talk, such as error correction, content feedback, scaffolding, and so forth. On the basis of these results, some pedagogical implications were made.

This study aims to investigate the effect of DDL on English lexico-grammar learning by Korean middle school students with respect to the types of learning approach (deductive vs. inductive DDL), the student’s level of English (low vs. high level), and the complexity of lexico-grammar items (simple vs. complex). A total of five experimental lessons were given to 36 students divided into two groups: one group received the lessons through the deductive DDL approach and the other group through the inductive DDL approach. The study found that both inductive and deductive DDL were effective in the learning of English lexico-grammar by the Korean middle school students. However, deductive DDL was more effective for the high level students, while inductive DDL was more appropriate for low level students. In addition, both deductive and inductive DDL were effective for teaching simple lexico-grammar items, but deductive DDL was more effective for teaching complex ones. Most of the participants showed positive responses about DDL and expressed a view that they were able to learn the meanings as well as the forms of target lexico-grammar items.

The purpose of this study is to investigate in-depth high school students’ strategy use in reading English texts of College Scholastic Ability Test (KSAT). This study employed a think-aloud method to look into the reading process by task types and by reading proficiency. Six high school students, three high-level and three low-level readers, were asked to perform reading tasks of three types, ‘finding a theme’, ‘filling the gap’, ‘finding an irrelevant sentence & inserting a sentence’, thinking out loud after training. The results are as follows. First, the participants used varied types of reading strategies regardless of top-down/bottom-up. ‘Guessing from the context’ and ‘paraphrasing in L1’, were most frequently used, and ‘using schema’ and ‘sensing the logical organization’ were least used.’ Second, different strategy use patterns were shown by task types: Far more strategies were used in ‘finding a theme’ than the others, especially, attending to keyword. Third, the high-level readers employed more reading strategies than the low-level counterparts. Furthermore, the strategy use pattern was very different between groups: The low-level readers seldom used ‘checking discourse markers,’ ‘synthesizing information,’ and ‘questioning’ that the high level readers commonly used.