This article focuses on analysis of 11 storytelling samples produced by Korean adult test-takers of an English speaking proficiency test. The process of telling stories, hearing the stories, and retelling them is a commonly used way of communication with others not only in a classroom but also in everyday life, and moreover storytelling is a task often used in English speaking proficiency tests. Although it is surely an important part of our lives as mentioned above, there has not been much research on structure and characteristics of storytelling and its value in English language education. It should be discussed in public that what storytelling can do for English education in Korea, more specifically in teaching English speaking. This study provides what cyclical structure of storytelling is and what it means to English language education in Korea. It is illustrated that storytelling task samples of advanced learners of English can be well understood from the framework of storytelling components (Bidell, Hubbard, & Weaver, 1997).

The purposes of this paper are to report the English proficiency of Korean university students through TOEIC test, and to suggest feasible ways to improve their communicative competence. A total of one thousand and forty-two sophomore students who took the Practical English course participated in this study. The data based on TOEIC scores were analyzed and the major findings revealed that: (1) Although students had slightly higher scores on the written language sections than on the spoken language parts, they had the lowest scores in the grammar section; (2) The total listening comprehension scores were significantly correlated with the total reading scores; (3) There was a high positive correlation between students’ proficiency level and their scores; (4) Multiple regression analysis showed that part 3 (short conversations) influenced significantly on the total listening part, while part 6 (grammar) had a significant effect on the total reading part. In conclusion, these findings contribute to the emerging picture of what constitutes a successful language learner by proposing a more refined model based on Willis’. In conclusion, the results of this study offer several suggestions for language teaching professionals as providers of effective instruction of communication strategies for enhancing the development of communicative competence.

Face-to-face interview format has been widely used to elicit English language samples in oral proficiency testing. It is desirable to replicate target language use situations in oral testing, and the direct testing format is believed to assess more authentic and interactive language abilities. However, it has been argued that speech samples from unstructured face-to-face interviews are quite different from those in natural communication settings. The purpose of this study was to understand the construct to be assessed through an unstructured face-to-face interview, which was adopted to an English speaking contest. Data from the English speaking contest were analyzed in terms of how they were different from the characteristics of naturally occurring conversations. It was found that the test construct in the English speaking contest did not reflect the features of natural conversation specifically in the areas of turn-taking, adjacency pairs, and topic nomination due to asymmetrical power relations between interviewer and interviewees. Therefore, it was suggested that we need to incorporate diverse discourse-based approaches into current speaking skill assessments, which can interpret spoken language data in many ways.

The purpose of this experimental study is threefold. First is to investigate how significantly EFL learner’s competence in the English pronoun as cohesive tie correlates with their reading proficiency. Second is to search for pedagogical implications for acquisition of the pronouns with reference to awareness-raising instruction. Third is to examine how narration variation affects EFL learners’ co-interpretative competence in the pronouns created in descriptive or direct speech narration. The subjects were grouped into two by pedagogical variable, i.e. awareness- raising instruction. Both control and experimental groups were given three tests: 1) house-made Toefl as pretest or norm test, and two post-tests: 2) Pronoun Test in which every pronoun was asked to be co-interpreted with its referents in the reading text; 3) Reading Proficiency Test constructed by a close technique. All the test scores were statistically processed in terms of t-test and the Pearson correlation. The statistics revealed a positively significant correlation (0.743 or 0.629) between EFL learners’ co-interpretive competence in the English pronoun and their reading proficiency. Furthermore, the impact of awareness- raising instruction turned out to be significant for co-interpretive competence and thus for reading proficiency. This experimental study concludes that higher competence in the pronoun corresponds to higher proficiency in reading. Thus acquisition of English pronouns must be facilitated at the discourse level by means of intra, inter, and intra-intersentential co-interpretation with their referents.

This study investigates the nature and the validity of the PhonePass SET-10 test designed to measure test-takers’ English oral proficiency using the automated computer technology. For this study, the data from 84 Korean college students were collected: students’ TEPS scores, PhonePass SET-10 results as well as the results from the survey developed to measure their attitudes toward the new format of English speaking test. Based on the analysis of the study, it is found out that there exists a positive correlation between the TEPS scores and the PhonePass SET-10 results of the participants, indicating that in fact the computer-based automated evaluating system can significantly contribute to assessing students’ English oral proficiency while the items and the purpose of the test administration are relatively limited. It is also reported that the participants of this study showed positive attitudes toward the PhonePass SET-10 with a hope that the newly developed speaking test will help them further their English study.