L1 and L2 summaries written by Korean university students in an EFL writing class were studied to determine the causes of instances of “plagiarism.” Summaries in both L1 and L2 were evaluated holistically along with seven essays in L2. It was found that more proficient writers in L1 and L2 tend to demonstrate less Reliance on the Source Text1); and a good amount of Reliance was also present in L1 as well as L2, suggesting that L2 interference is not the only cause of Reliance. These findings indicate a relation between Reliance on the Source text and writing ability both in L1 and L2. Moreover, a closer look at instances of Reliance often revealed efforts by the writers to integrate source text material into their own texts, though these attempts often seemed like “plagiarism” to writing teachers. However, Reliance in these cases may not be plagiarism per se from students’ point of view. The results are expected to help teachers understand the causes and nature of students’Reliance on the Source text in the writing instruction.

The present study aimed at investigating the effects of collaborative work between Korean EFL university students and international foreign students on Intercultural Communicative Competence. Twenty four students (14 Korean students and 10 international students) participated in this research. Chen and Starosta’s (2000) intercultural sensitivity scale was implemented with Paradigm Software to measure the participants’ resolution latency time while they were responding to the survey. The results demonstrated that two groups showed significant differences in the areas of respect for cultural difference and interaction confidence. Also, apart from the response value, the analysis of resolution latency time showed other aspects of participants’ cognitive level of intercultural sensitivity. Thus, this study indicates that a multi-round analysis can give a more in-depth insight beyond the mean value of the survey’s response.

This paper aims to explore the problematic nature of the use of adverbial connectors employed in NNS and NS academic essays by using two different corpora from Korean university students and from English native speakers in the UK. Combining corpus-based and discourse analytic approaches, the study focuses on the frequency and distributions of adverbial connectors, thus investigating in what ways this can affect the rhetorical features in terms of the text cohesion and structure. The results indicate that the Korean sample students shared the problem of other L2 writers with the overuse of overall connectors, but they showed a strong preference for using colloquial and spoken forms of adverbial connectors. On semantic relations, the overuse problem occurred in the listing, in particular, reinforcing types of the adverbial connectors. The noteworthy difference is that the mechanical repetitions of listing and contrasting ideas, and connecting them in a cause-effect sequence was identified more frequently in the Korean student texts than in the native student ones. However, counter-argument is more preferred in the argumentative context of the native student texts with more overt use of contrastive connecting items. Finally, most of the misused connectors were identified to simply repeat the ideas in the same viewpoint, which may have led to a failure in developing logical sequences in argumentative discourse. Another misuse type of connectors may derive from sociopragmatic transfer from L1 to L2. The findings thus may give some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise culture-specific register awareness and understand the different semantic types of adverbial connectors.

The appropriate use of hedged expressions is particularly a problematic feature of non-native writers' English academic writings. This study analyses the features of hedging in NNS and NS academic essays by using two different corpora from Korean masters' students and from English native speakers in the UK. This corpus-based study focuses on the types and frequencies of epistemic devices, examining the salient features of hedging used in the Korean L2 writings. The results from both frequency and contextual analysis indicate that they rely heavily on using modal verbs and other certainty markers of adverbs, and this led to stronger and direct statements. Along with their serious confusion with impersonalized or personalized forms in relation to the usage of lexical verbs, they showed a strong preference for giving personal involvement, which occurred in specific patterns of personalized devices in conversational hedges. These patterns can be partly explained by the cultural transfer from L1 to L2 as well as lack of linguistic knowledge across different genres. The findings thus can contribute to giving some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise both culture and genre-specific awareness in the areas of second language pragmatics.