This study investigated EFL college students’ culture-related templates of written texts along the possibility of inter-cultural transfer. We designed a case study to explore how certain cultural assumptions contribute to EFL students’ rhetorical decisions while writing an argumentative writing. The participants were four EFL college students. Multiple data sources include background questionnaires, argumentative essays, and in-depth retrospective interviews. To analyze rhetorical choices in the participants’ writing, we identified choices of argumentation subtypes, and introduction and conclusion components. We also categorized the location of the writer’s main claim and thesis statement. The interview data were qualitatively analyzed to see what rhetorical resources participants draw from the cultural/educational contexts, and which factors had influenced the participants’ rhetorical strategy. Data analyses indicate that each participant manipulated different rhetorical structures to strengthen the rhetorical impact of their writing. Indeed, the complex constellation of individual participants’ cultural resources was at play in their L2 writing. This study contributes to our understanding of the rhetorical templates of L2 texts as constructs that are always in process, and therefore adaptable and negotiable.

Lexical richness makes an important contribution to L2 writing quality. To explore its importance, the study aims to identify and explain how lexical richness manifests in argumentative essays written in the final exam of reading and writing class by thirty-five undergraduates. The lexical richness consists of four interrelated elements: lexical diversity, density, sophistication, and fluency. Detailed text analysis can identify these elements in EFL students' academic writing. The correlation analysis showed that the use of lexical diversity, sophistication, and fluency all affect writing quality and can be seen differently in a text depending on different score ranges, vocabulary knowledge and linguistic performance. Further, the regression analysis revealed that the lexical sophistication was found to be the most significant predictor that contributes to writing quality. In sum, the lexical richness displayed in written text is a result of a person’s underlying vocabulary knowledge. This study ends with a pedagogical implication for teaching lexical richness in EFL academic coursework.

The present study examines the usage patterns of stance that constructions in Korean EFL learners' written corpora by two different proficiency groups (KEFL 1, KEFL 2) to figure out some developmental features of marking stance in L2 academic prose. Focusing on three main categories (stance verbs, adjectives, and nouns) controlling stance that clauses, the study compares the frequency of each feature by the categories and their subcategories across the corpora. Employing both quantitative and qualitative analyses, the study found a marked developmental path across the corpora as a cross-sectional study. Indeed, less proficient L2 learners tended to use spoken involvement features as ‘a subjective transmitter’, emphasizing the writer's view only with a private authorial voice. However, more advanced learners showed remarkable features as ‘an objective interpreter’ with more implicitly detached stances. Despite a few chunk expressions considered as being memorized, more complex grammatical resources appropriate for academic discourse were observed. Finally, as the final stage, this study suggests ‘a refined stance-taker’ referring to an expert writer in the academic discourse community, which may be devoid in untrained native speakers' writing. In accordance with the need for university students to transition into more advanced academic discourse sooner, this study provides some practical insights into teaching and learning of stance patterns in using that complement clauses in English academic discourse.

Although the use of Grammatical Metaphor (GM) has been regarded as one of the representative features of academic writing in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), not many studies have explored its role in second or foreign language writers’ writing quality. This study aimed to discover the potential relationship between GM development and argumentative writing quality of advanced Korean EFL learners, while controlling for their overall language proficiency and reading comprehension ability. The findings from this study unveiled significant contribution of the use of both premature and mature GM and also identified transcategorization as the specific GM that has relatively stronger predictability of writing quality. The results from current research yield meaningful pedagogical implications for writing instruction in Korean EFL contexts.

In spite of the benefits of English oral presentations on EFL learners' proficiency and competence, English presentations have not obtained much attention as instructional medium in the field of English education. With the belief that EFL learners' experience of English presentation performance can provide valuable insights for educators and researchers, this study intended to describe how EFL learners perceive their presentation performance through their reflective self-assessment. In particular, adopting Otoshi and Heffernen's (2008) rubric of evaluation, this study examined what a group of Korean EFL learners were concerned in regard to their presentation performances and how they evaluated them. The data collected were 41 reflective self-assessment papers written by 41 Korean college students. The papers were coded, categorized and interpreted. Findings showed that voice quality is the area the students in this paper were most concerned about. Negative evaluations of their presentation performance outweighed the positive evaluations except in the area of Power Point use. Lastly, rehearsal and visual aids education sessions as well as differentiating spoken and written English were suggested as instruction implications for educators.

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.

This study explores how Korean English learners process English caused-motion constructions (CMC) through online and offline experiments. The focus was on how Korean learners’ processing of English CMC is affected by the typological difference between English and Korean. Of the 77 volunteer participants recruited, 17 were native English speakers and 60 were Korean EFL learners. The experiments included a sentence completion task (SCT) as an online experiment, and an acceptability jugment task (AJT) and a translation (correction) task as offline experiments. The results showed that in the SCT, the Korean learners showed difficulty in combining process and result events with intransitive manner verbs. In the AJT, they rarely accepted the CMCs with intransitive manner verbs, but easily accepted the ‘causative verb + byphrase’ structures with the same type of verbs. When the sentences were employed in the AJT were asked to be translated into Korean, the low-intermediate Korean learners were likely to drop the result meaning and interpret the preposition phrase as a locative rather than a goal. In sum, Korean learners showed similar patterns to native English speakers in processing path verbs and transitive manner verbs, but different pattern in processing intransitive manner verbs. These findings demonstrate that Korean learners' processing of English CMC is heavily influenced by their L1 when the construction accompanied intransitive manner verbs.

Much research has not been conducted on how classroom-based research articles concerning teaching effectiveness in the ESL/EFL classroom have changed over time, in spite of deep interest in the field. Therefore, this study aims to examine the characteristics of research articles on effective teaching in the ESL/EFL classroom, focusing specifically on articles from TESOL Quarterly. For this purpose, this study searched articles using three key terms; effective teaching, ESL/EFL, and activity. Articles which included those terms were investigated, depending on research topic and publication year, and four key facts were found; the importance of teachers’ input (older articles), a focus on group or peer work (newer articles), teachers’ education, and the use of students’ native languages. While students preferred teachers’ reliable and explicit input in the past, modern articles tended to recommend more frequent interactions among peer groups in the English learning classroom. Limited resources in teaching contexts asked for additional qualifications from ESL/EFL teachers, thus emphasizing teacher education as an important factor for effective teaching. Lastly, the use of students’ native language had a positive influence on learning English. The findings of this study suggest some implications for how effective teaching in Korean context could be implemented.

In argumentative writing, writers are expected to use hedged expressions and stance devices through specific linguistic expressions to convince their proposition effectively. Yet little research attention has been paid to whether the inclusion of such devices is related to the overall quality of second or foreign language learners’ argumentative writing. In this study, hedges and stance devices that are included in 28 advanced Korean EFL writers’ argumentative writing were analyzed to identify their potential relation to the overall writing quality. Analyses demonstrated that although hedges and stance devices were related to argumentative writing quality in general, the specific linguistic forms that predicted two different aspects of writing quality – formal and content quality – were different. Specifically, hedges played a significant positive role in only content quality of writing, and the specific stance devices that significantly predicted formal quality did not contribute to the content quality, and vice versa. The findings from this study provides important pedagogical implications for EFL writing instruction.

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationships among English learners’ motivation, strategies and achievement, with a group of 51 Korean three-year college students. The students responded to the questionnaire of learning motivation and strategies. Also they took a mock TOEIC. Multiple regression analysis allowed for the analysis of learners’ motivation and strategies to predict a single dependent variable, their English achievement. The findings revealed that, first, ‘internal motivation’ was found the highest predictor of their English study, while ‘instrumental motivation-individual’ was the lowest motivation type for students. Second, participants used ‘social strategies’ most frequently in studying English, and they used the others in the order of ‘compensation strategies’, ‘affective strategies’, ‘cognitive strategies’, ‘memory strategies’ and ‘metacognitive strategies’. Last, the impact of learning motivation and strategies on the TOEIC scores was not statistically significant, but the relationship of learning motivation and strategies was found to be positive. Implications for the practical classroom and suggestions for further research are suggested.

This study examined EFL college-level learners’ perception toward the contentbased instruction (CBI) by focusing on their participation in and expectation on the courses practiced in a strong form of CBI. Having analyzed the data collected from a questionnaire, observation and interview, the study found that the participants, 39 students who enrolled in two different CBI courses at a university in South Korea, put top priority on the enhancement of content-knowledge considering their CBI course as a content-course, not as a language-course. Second, the participants seemed to prefer participation opportunities induced by a required and prepared speaking task such as presentation through which they can practice a formal speech appropriate for their education experience and cognitive maturity. They also seemed to favor instructor-initiated interaction rather than being put into pair- or group-discussion between and among themselves. Third, the lack of participation was mainly attributed to the lack of understanding contents rather than lack of language skills. Based on the research findings, the study made suggestions on how to offer CBI courses more effectively for a particular group of EFL college-level learners who already earned basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS), yet to reach cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP).

We explored whether task complexity, operationalized by the two types of writing prompts, affects EFL high school students’ narrative writing in terms of syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, fluency, cohesion, and text quality. 32 intermediate EFL students who were randomly assigned to two prompt groups completed a written narrative task based on a series of sixteen pictures. Task complexity was operationalized as a bare versus frame prompt. The results indicate that the task complexity had an impact on lexical sophistication measures. The students in the framed prompt group were able to include more sophisticated vocabulary in their narratives than those in the bare prompt group. The findings are discussed in terms of the Limited Attentional Capacity Model in that the students in the bare prompt group might have prioritized meaning rather than form in order to ease attentional overload. The findings of our study could assist teachers in selecting writing prompts that have the potential to elicit the targeted features of writing performance.

As research evidence for the facilitative effects of reading strategies on reading comprehension has been accumulating, research and pedagogical interests in prereading strategies such as prediction and schema activation are increasing. Yet, little research evidence of how actual performance on such tasks may be related to reading comprehension is sparse. This study explores whether prediction abilities and content schema are related to Korean middle school EFL learners’ reading comprehension abilities in English, and whether such potential relations may differ for factual and inferential comprehension. The study participants were one hundred thirty-seven Korean seventh grade students, and their performance on schema activation, prediction, and reading comprehension abilities was investigated, while controlling for their overall language proficiency and literacy skills. The findings indicated that although both prediction abilities and content schema facilitated reading comprehension, prediction abilities were a relatively stronger predictor of both factual and inferential comprehension. The results further suggest the need to provide effective trainings on pre-reading strategies.

The purpose of this study is to investigate error patterns in EFL college students’ English writing as well as their change over time, based on the teacher’s feedback. In order to accomplish this purpose, two research questions were constructed; first, what are the characteristics of Korean EFL students’ writing based on the maturity of English sentence by the T-unit analysis? Second, what types of error patterns are produced in Korean EFL students’ writing? Also, how do the error patterns change based on the teacher’s feedback over time? The participants were four Korean EFL college students, and they were asked to pre-write, draft, revise and edit until they completed their final draft. The results of pre- and post-writing test were also analyzed. The major findings are as follows: 1) The mean number of T-unit among participants was 42.25 units, and the mean number of words per T-unit was 10.95 words. 2) The most frequently committed errors were found out as lexical and morphological errors. Moreover, the rate of lexical and sentence structure errors has been dropped, whereas the rate of punctuation errors has increased as the teacher’s feedback progressed over time. Pedagogical and practical suggestions are also made on the effective teaching of English writing in Korean classroom settings.

The current study aims at investigating differences, if any, of EFL learners' and teachers' (native and non-native English teachers) perception of the role of grammar instruction and error correction in L2 learning. For this study 617 college students, 53 non-native teachers, and 41 native teachers were asked to respond to a survey questionnaire. The findings were as follows: 1) some discrepancies were evident between the two teacher groups in perception of grammar instruction, while they shared similar perceptions of error correction; 2) the more proficient in English the students were, the more positive perception of the two constructs they showed; and 3) the Korean teacher group and students showed less negative perceptions of grammar instruction than the native teacher group, whereas differences between the students and the two teacher groups were noticeable. Teaching implications are discussed in view of the necessity of exploring students' and teachers' perception of grammar instruction and error correction.

This study investigated the efficacy of retrieving EFL vocabulary from memory as a long-term retention strategy. Three learning treatments, rereading, recognizing and recalling target words, were compared with the assistance of 74 university students who underwent the treatments to learn academic American English during a 15- week semester. In addition to investigating the efficacy of the learning treatments, the study explored the effects of recognition and recall testing in relation to the treatments for possible interactions between learning treatment and test format. The study found that while rereading was the preferred student study strategy, recalling words was a more efficacious learning practice. Recognition learning was also less effective than recalling words, which suggests that the use of recall tests will promote long-term retention more than recognition tests such as multiple-choice tests. Learning treatment and test format comparisons suggested that the retrieval of words as a learning strategy was likely to be the most effective study practice regardless of test type despite transfer-appropriate processing inconsistencies.

The study aims to investigate the effect of post-reading question-generation activities on Korean middle school students’ English reading abilities with respect to cooperative learning. Two groups of students read the same reading materials; however, one group as an experimental group generated questions of three types, literal, inferential, and evaluative questions, while the other group as a control group answered comprehension questions. Each group was further divided into two sub-groups by cooperative and individual learning. A statistical analysis of the recall test scores reveals a positive effect of post-reading question-generation activities and cooperative learning on English reading abilities. The reading test scores by the three question types further illustrated variations across the question types: the experimental group outperformed the control group in the inferential and evaluative questions and individual learning was detected to be more effective than cooperative learning in the evaluative questions. Interactional effects were observed between post-reading activities and cooperative learning in the literal and evaluative questions. The findings suggest question-generation activities as a beneficial post-reading task, though their effectiveness can vary by question types and learning context.

This study was an attempt to explore how EFL college-level learners perceive flipped learning or flipped classroom approach which would be practiced with Content-Based Instruction (CBI) courses. As an effort to find a way for the CBI learners to be served more effectively in terms of earning content-knowledge and improving L2-using skills, the new approach of flipped learning has been tapped into first of all by looking into their expectations and concerns that they might have if the new approach would be employed in their CBI classroom. The analysis of the data provided by the 159 participants revealed that they did not show clear preference or strong negative attitude toward the new approach. While the young college-level learners appeared technology-savvy, they did not seem confident enough in the new approach mainly due to the on-line component of the flipped classroom approach, which would require more responsibility of their learning. The study also made suggestions on what should be considered if the new approach can be successfully implemented and help the learners earn better learning experience.

Collocational competence is important part of L2 English amplifier acquisition. This competence entails learners' ability to use the right combination of words with natural-sounding semantic prosody. It is known to be an integral part of mastering pragmatic function of L2 English vocabulary, which also is a challenge for the learners at the same time (Zhang, 2008). Despite the importance, previous studies on ESL/EFL learners' amplifier use lacked empirical evidence and insight about semantic prosody. The purpose of present learner corpora-based study was to fill the existing research gap by finding patterns of amplifiers. Two existing corpora were selected, coded, and analyzed to fulfill this purpose; they are Korean EFL learners and native speakers of English (NE). Results from analysis found Korean learners' overall underuse in amplifiers. Also, frequently occurring amplifier ranks for each corpus differed. Semantic prosody analysis revealed that amplifier associated with dominantly positive connotation were very, really, and highly. Amplifiers associated with dominantly negative connotation were extremely, absolutely, severely, and greatly. Contrast analysis showed that the only amplifier that Koreans and NEs used amplifier to signal same semantic prosody dominantly was severely (negative). Other than that, Koreans and NE showed salient discrepancies in semantic prosody use. The pedagogical implication of the present study is that vocabulary teaching need to include semantic prosody, and the first step will be to conduct ESL/EFL teacher education about it (Zhang, 2009). It's important to remind them of the value of semantic prosody in language communication (S Lee, 2011).

Park, Yong-Yae. 2018. “Advice Receiving in College EFL Writing Tutorials”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(1). 159~200. This paper explores interactional practices observed in advice receiving by the tutees in college EFL writing tutorials within the framework of conversation analysis. The data for the study include 24 audio-recorded writing tutorial sessions at a university in Korea. The findings indicate three types of advice receiving: 1) advice receiving with marked acknowledgments using a:: (‘oh’) to mark the advice to be informative and newsworthy; 2) advice receiving with unmarked acknowledgments; and 3) advice resisting. Advice resisting can be further divided into three types, that is, (1) making excuses, (2) complaining, and (3) disagreeing. In the first two types of advice resisting, the tutors' advice deals with various problematic areas in the tutee's writing, and the tutees resist advice by pointing out their inability to do what is advised or complaining about the complexity of the task. The third type, disagreeing, takes place when the tutees resist the tutors' advice on vocabulary choices. These resisting patterns seem to differ from those observed elsewhere (cf, Heritage and Sefi 1992) and reflect the nature of the tutorials and the particular tutees in this study. Finally, the study suggests some pedagogical implications on EFL learning and tutor training.