The present study investigates the collocations of the first person plural possessive pronoun in order to identify L1 influence in Korean EFL learners' writing, in comparison with native English speakers’ writing. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, this learner corpus research focuses on the use of the first person pronoun OUR in English, which seems to be negatively transferred by somewhat peculiar usages of the Korean equivalent pronoun wuli. The contrastive interlanguage analysis first shows that Korean learners significantly overuse first person plural pronouns whereas they significantly underuse first person singular pronouns, compared to native English speakers. Second, it also indicates that the distribution of frequencies of the ‘OUR + noun’ collocations according to a classification based on the Sejong Corpus seems very similar in both corpora, and that the frequencies are likely to be dependent upon specific individual collocates. Third, Korean learners appear to particularly overuse six specific ‘OUR + noun’ collocations rather than ‘MY + noun’ collocations, which can be argued to be empirical evidence of L1 influence. The findings of the present study are expected to provide valuable implications to English language teaching in classroom in Korea.

본 연구는 영어 능력 초급 수준의 EFL 성인 학습자들의 글쓰기 불안이 과정 중심 쓰기 접근(process writing approach) 교수에 의해 어떻게 변화하는지를 조사하였다. Daly and Miller(1975a)의 DM-WAT를 근거로 본 연구의 영어 글쓰기 학습자들을 위해 약간의 수정을 가미한 WAT (글쓰기 불안감 테스트)를 사용하여 과정중심 쓰기 접근 교수를 실시하기 전과 후의 학습자들의 심리적 변화를 조사하여 글쓰기 불안의 네 가지 요인으로 분석하였다: (1) 영어 글쓰기를 좋아하는 정도(Enjoyment of writing in English, EOW); (2) 영어 글쓰기에 대한 부정적 인식(Negative perception about writing in English, NPW); (3) 평가에 대한 두려움(Fear of evaluation, FOE); 그리고 (4) 영어 글쓰기에 대한 자신감(Self-confidence of writing in English, SCW). 결과에 의하면 전체적으로 학습자들의 부정적인 영어 글쓰기에 대한 두려움이 과정 중심 글쓰기 교수 이후 네 가지 요인에 있어서 현저히 감소하였다. 특히 여성 학습자들의 사전 사후 부정적 글쓰기에 대한 두려움의 차이가 남성 학습자들보다 더 의미 있는 결과를 나타내었으며, 학습자 모두가 두 가지 글쓰기 요인, 즉 NPW 와 FOE 요인에 있어서 과정 중심 글쓰기의 효과를 더욱 나타내었다. 이는 흔히 제 2 언어 학습자들의 글쓰기 불안은 언어적 지식 및 자신감의 부족에서 비롯되기에, 본 연구의 학습자들은 5단계의 과정 중심 글쓰기 활동들이 언어적 자신감을 높이는 스캐폴딩 글쓰기(scaffolded writing)와 같은 역할을 하여 그 결과 부정적 글쓰기 불안감이 현저히 낮아짐을 보여주고 있다. 즉 사전 쓰기(pre-writing) 활동에서의 브레인스토밍, 모델텍스트를 통한 구조, 어휘, 문법, 주제문 찾기 등의 언어적 요인 살펴보기 및 개인별 쓰기 완성(drafting), 그리고 수정단계(revising)에서의 교사의 피드백 및 친구와의 상호작용을 통한 피드백 등을 통해 그들의 영어사용에 대한 지식의 부족을 향상시키고 협력하는 학습 분위기의 영향으로 영어 글쓰기에 대한 부정적 태도 및 감정적인 면에서 훨씬 완화되고 편안해짐을 보여준 결과로 여겨진다.

The present study aimed at examining the effects of English collaborative writing and learners’ reflections on the experience of collaborative writing. The study was classroom based, and the participants (n=33) were Korean graduate students majoring in English education. The study compared texts produced by pairs (n=22) with those produced by individuals (n=11). Among the participants, nine students, involving the collaborative writing, participated in the follow-up interview. The study found that collaborative writing had an overall significant effect on students’ L2 writing. In particular, pairs produced better texts in terms of content, organization, and vocabulary, but not grammar and mechanics. The results of the student interviews showed that collaborative writing helped them pool ideas and provide each other with useful feedback. Most students were positive about the experience while a few of them demonstrated some reservation about collaborative writing.

The English to-infinitive structure has over a dozen different functions, presenting a difficult area for EFL students. The present study shows a relatively dynamic profile of the use of ten to-infinitives functions appearing in EFL children's story writing as the children progress in grade levels and English proficiency—an area that has never been investigated previously. To-infinitives that function as an ‘object’ or ‘purpose’ were most prominent. The students used a higher number of to-infinitives as they progressed from the third to sixth grades. The increase between the four adjacent grade levels did not reach a level of significance, but the increase between middle (third and fourth) and upper (fifth and sixth) levels was significant. The difference was striking when the entire group was re-sorted into lower vs. higher proficiency groups: the increase in the use of to-infinitives was better explained by English proficiency improvement than by grade level progression. This in-depth analysis into the sub-functions adds to the existing knowledge about to-infinitives, which might otherwise remain oversimplified.

Many researchers called for a need to expose L2 learners to diverse writing contexts, and L2-L2 interactions using English as a communication tool became more common than communication with native English speakers. The present study introduced two groups of Korean university students to a task, for which they were grouped differently: the first with a group of students at a Chinese university and the second with Chinese students as well as students of a different Korean university. These groups performed a task that they selected from among three choices. In the process of their e-mail exchanges, the students' pre- and post-task perspectives were explored through two surveys. In addition, the students expressed their reflections regarding this experience in writing. Overall, the students seemed to consider this experience of exchanging emails with L2 students speaking a different L1 useful and it helped some students gain confidence in their ability to use English as a communication tool. This study provided an opportunity to expand the writing context in EFL classrooms.

This paper addresses pedagogical implications of contrastive rhetoric by focusing on recent trends in the field of contrastive rhetoric. The paper first addresses traditional contrastive rhetoric and highlights major issues along the way. It then focuses on recent diversification of and challenges to traditional contrastive rhetoric. For this purpose, the paper takes a close look at a) contrastive rhetoric's recent focus on rhetorical similarities rather than differences, b) its examination of ESL/EFL learners' perspectives, c) the introduction of critical contrastive rhetoric, and d) the most recent challenges based on the English-as-an-international-lingua-franca perspective. The paper concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications of such diversification efforts and challenges. The discussion covers contrastive rhetoric's contribution to the increased awareness of ethnocentrism underlying traditional contrastive rhetoric, the need to study about actual impact of teaching rhetorical differences and/or similarities, and the necessity of investigating ESL/EFL learners’ beliefs about writing in English, which is believed to have a filtering effect on ESL/EFL learners' acceptance of contrastive rhetorical information.

This paper examines the nature of teacher’s corrective feedback as mediation in a Korean EFL beginner writing context. The theories of Vygotsky's socio-cultural learning in the zone of proximal development (ZPD) take into account the background of the stu

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.