Despite the recognized importance of morphological knowledge to literacy outcomes such as vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, two of its subconstructs— morphological awareness and morphological processing—have received comparatively little attention. In response, the aim of the study reported here was to examine how the relationships between morphological awareness and morphological processing, especially in terms of morphological transparency and morphological frequency, contribute to the vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension of 62 native Korean-speaking secondary school students—27 eighth-graders and 35 tenth-graders— learning English as a foreign language. The students’ performance on the Test of Morphological Structure and the Word Reading Test was assessed to gauge their compounding awareness, inflectional awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. The results indicated that the students’ performance was varied depending on morphological transparency and frequency. In addition, it was not morphological processing, but rather morphological awareness that explained variances in vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, when compounding awareness and inflectional awareness were controlled for. This paper discusses what such findings imply for teaching English as a foreign language to Korean learners.

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.

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.

이 연구는 국가 수준 영어 교육과정에서 지도하도록 의도하고 있는 어휘, 문법, 의사소통기능, 내용 요소 등을 아우르고 있는 중학교 영어 교과서의 본문에 대해 질문 중심 하브루타 형식의 토론을 통해 학생들의 이해 수준을 심화하고, 본문의 내용을 확장한 주제로 과정 중심의 영어 작문을 지도했을 때, 영어 쓰기에 대한 학생들의 인식과 자아효능감에 구체적으로 어떠한 영향을 주는지 알아보고자 했다. 이를 위해, 질문 중심의 하브루타와 과정 중심 쓰기 지도 방법에 이론적 토대를 두고 3단계로 설계된 GROWTH라는 수업 모형을 고안했고, 2017년 3월부터 11월까지, 서울 서부에 소재한 중학교 3학년 두 학급의 학생 54명을 대상으로 수업시간 중 해당 수업모형을 적용했다. 수업모형 적용 전후, 설문을 실시한 결과, 해당 수업 모형은 짝‧모둠 중심의 토의·토론에 대한 학생들의 인식에 긍정적인 영향을 주었고, 영어 쓰기에 대한 학생들의 자아효능감을 향상시켰으며, 학생들로 하여금 영어 쓰기를 시도하고 연습하는 것의 중요성을 일깨웠음이 드러났다. 이와 같은 연구 결과는 중학교 수업 현장에서 과정 중심 수행평가의 일환으로 보다 적극적으로 영어 쓰기를 지도할 필요가 있음을 시사한다.

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of the sentence-writing task on English vocabulary learning of Korean high school students. The effectiveness of the sentence-writing task can be explained based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001); yet, there has been no consistency in the results of the previous studies on this hypothesis. In the present study, the effects of the sentence-writing task on vocabulary learning were re-examined in comparison with the gap-filling task. In addition, considering that there have been no studies addressing the effects of autobiographical elaboration (relating the meaning of a certain word to one’s own experience) on memory, the effects of the autobiographical sentence-writing task were compared to those of the imaginary sentence-writing task. Forty high proficiency and 40 low proficiency learners were randomly assigned either of the sentence-writing or the gap-filling task. The results demonstrated that the sentence-writing task is more effective in vocabulary learning than the gap-filling task, regardless of the learners’ proficiency levels. However, no significant difference was found between the effects of the autobiographical sentence-writing task and the imaginary sentence-writing task. Based on the results, the pedagogical implications were discussed in the conclusion chapter.

This study investigates individual verb differences in Korean learners‟ use of English non-alternating unaccusatives as well as the factors that influence various errors. Specifically, it focuses on the effects of L1 transfer and animacy of subjects on overpassivization errors. Concordance lines from a learner corpus consisting of 6,572 essays written by Korean college-level learners were analyzed to observe the syntactic distribution across ten non-alternating unaccusative verbs. The results revealed that overpassivization errors show disproportionate dispersion across the ten unaccusative verbs, and that Korean L1 influence is not a significant factor while inanimate subjects influence overpassivization. Furthermore, salient error patterns such as transitivization and overgenerated be were identified from the Korean learners‟ use of unaccusative verbs. This study proposes that some unaccusative verbs are more susceptible to overpassivization errors, and that Korean learners of English will benefit from being able to identify the factors contributing to errors for each unaccusative verb.

In order to inform foreign language education practices that can empower students to properly retrieve and utilize information in today’s society, research on the nature of reading that takes place on the Internet—referred to as online research and comprehension—is of paramount importance. As an initial step, this study investigated the strategies employed by six Korean tertiary-level learners of English that engaged in a second language online research and comprehension (L2 ORC) task. To this end, screen recordings of L2 ORC sessions and verbal data from stimulated recall interviews were triangulated in order to identify and categorize strategy use behind L2 ORC. The results revealed that a wide variety of strategies for constructing a coherent reading path as well as comprehending single and multiple digital texts contributed to successful L2 ORC. These findings demonstrate that the current conception of L2 reading needs to be expanded to encompass the novel challenges posed by the Internet.

The main objective of this research was to probe the DLM-based teaching method for Korean students’ English communication skills. For this study, the corpus was made of Korean reading materials with 307 frequently used sentence patterns extracted. The present research employing a quasi-experimental design and a comparative analysis of Korean and English corpora revealed the followings: first, the difference between the DLM (experimental group) and the CTR (control group) was examined in terms of the pretest score in order to identify the students’ level of English productive skills. After the pretest, meaningful translation focused DLM was employed in the instruction of the experimental group but not in the instruction of the control group. After one semester of teaching, on the posttest, the students in the DLM group outperformed the students in the CTR group. In conclusion, it can be inferred that the DLM teaching method is effective for English productive skills and can be a good solution to our English education environments in which both teachers and students use Korean as a medium of teaching English.

This paper examines the use of the present perfect by Korean learners of English. Forty-four first grade high school students and eleven college students participated and wrote an essay on a given topic. The writing samples were analyzed in terms of the appropriate, inappropriate uses of the present perfect and the relations between the inherent lexical aspects and the form use. The results showed that the learners used the present perfect in a good sense with appropriate perfect types. Most of them were accompanied with temporal adverbials such as since or so far. In addition, they also showed many misuses with past, present, and pluperfect for the present perfect, revealing that they tended to encode only one temporal part of the present perfect. Regarding the use of the aspectual verb, activities and states occurred more in the use of the present perfect in the students’ writings. Based on these results, pedagogical implications were suggested.

English has become an important language of science and scholarship due to the globalization and internationalization of higher education. As a result, there has been a rapid increase in English-mediated instruction (EMI) courses across English as a foreign language (EFL) countries. In an expansion of EMI courses, different reactions have arisen among professors between Korean and Nordic higher education contexts. Utilizing both literature search on EMI as well as insights from the researcher’s involvement in EMI projects, this article presents a comparative analysis of EMI between Korean and Nordic universities with the hope that it will contribute to more effective implementation of EMI within EFL universities such as the ones in Korea. The analysis demonstrates that although there are similar concerns about the expansion and implementation of EMI, the two contexts have fundamental differences, including the motivation for the introduction of EMI, linguistic environments, and philosophy of teaching and learning. These factors are intertwined and influence the implementation of EMI in each context. Therefore, in order to implement EMI more successfully in Korean universities, understanding the differences underlying the two contexts is required.

A growing number of task-based learning (TBL) research has employed a processoriented research framework to analyze second language data in L2 classrooms using a task-in-process vs. task-as-workplan dichotomy (e.g., Seedhouse, 2004). Adopting the task-in-process framework, the current study analyzes how students in Korean EFL classrooms interact during information gap task activities. How do sequences of interaction during information gap tasks differ from the task-as-workplan? What are the specific institutional goals that the participants orient to while completing these tasks? This article attempts to answer these questions by analyzing the interactions that occur during a series of information gap tasks performed by different groups of Korean middle school students. The findings show how information gap tasks create minimized and truncated sequences that are different from the task-as-workplan as well as from how people would interact in ordinary conversation. Rather than promoting more talk by engaging in negotiation of meaning, learners engaged in a series of completion-oriented sequences to find the correct response in the most efficient way possible. The paper ends with suggestions for improving the design of tasks in pedagogical settings.

Developing small learner and native corpora, this case study examines how Korean L2 learners used six types of lexical collocations in L2 writing to address (a) the frequency and acceptability of learner collocations, (b) problematic constituents of deviant collocations, and (c) possible sources of the learner difficulties. The overall frequency (about 8% of each corpus) and relative frequencies of each collocation type were similar between the learner and native corpora in descending order of adjective-noun, verb-noun, noun-noun, adverb-verb, adverb-adjective, and noun-verb combinations. The average and individual acceptability rates of each collocation type were around 70% and the problematic constituents were found both in nodes and collocates. L2 influence on learner difficulties mostly lied in confusions about synonyms, overuse of delexical verbs, and use of correct collocations in wrong contexts. Relying on L1 semantic representations, the learners produced non-habitual combinations, misrepresented the intended meaning, and paraphrased L2 collocations. Pedagogical implications arose for teaching L2 collocations about the importance of considering the immediate context of L2 writing and taking different approaches to different types of collocations.

Jang, In Chull & Yang, In Young. 2018. “Linguistic Representations of Korean Immigrant English in North American Media Space: An Analysis of Appa's English in Kim's Convenience”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(2), 1~36. With the increasing importance of the mass media in social life and the linguistic changes it incurs, sociolinguistic research on linguistic representations in cinematic discourse has been increasing recently. Situated within this growing body of emerging scholarship in sociolinguistics, this study examines how Korean immigrant English is represented in a Canadian TV sitcom, Kim’s Convenience. Drawing on the perspective that linguistic performances in fictional discourse serve as resources for sociolinguistic styling and characterization, this paper investigates how the linguistic representations of Korean immigrant English contribute to authenticating the character of a middle-aged male Korean immigrant called Appa in the TV series. For this purpose, Appa's English used throughout the TV series' first season (13 episodes) was analyzed at the phonological, syntactic, lexical, thematic, and semiotic levels. The analysis revealed that each linguistic level shows distinct but concerted efforts regarding the authentication of Appa as a Korean immigrant. The phonological features of his English effectively share those of Korean English, whereas the syntactic representations are characteristic of a simple register. The lexical, thematic, and semiotic representations additionally reinforce Appa's “Koreanness” through the sitcom's integration of topics and images related to Korean culture.

In this research synthesis, a total of 313 studies on English learning motivation published in South Korea from 2000 to 2017 were reviewed. The data were categorized into four criteria: publication year, research method, participant, and research topic. First, the annual trend clearly demonstrated that the number of motivation research showed a steady growth. The dominant research method was quantitative (207 papers) over qualitative (40 papers) and mixed methods (48 papers). University students (157 papers) were major population in English learning motivation research followed by junior high (36 papers), elementary (30 papers), high school students (30 papers), research synthesis (17 papers), and kindergarten students (3 papers). Most research focused on identifying specific subcomponents of English learning motivation in a particular research context. The study suggests that future research needs to focus more on diverse student group such as home-schoolers. Also, the use of research synthesis needs to be encouraged in order to capture the complex nature of English learning motivation.

This paper explores the English needs of culinary college students in Korea, asking whether their English needs differ by their desired careers. To this end, we administered a survey to 123 culinary college students and divided them into six groups based on their desired careers. The results show that the type of desired career of the participants is highly correlated with their perceived need for learning English, the kind of English skills that they want to learn, and the level of English proficiency that they hope to achieve. For example, students planning to work for a restaurant or hotel abroad had the highest English proficiency needs whereas those planning to study in graduate school in Korea and those planning to work for a restaurant or hotel in Korea had relatively lower needs. The results suggest that college English programs need to provide diverse college English courses to prepare students for their diverse future careers.

This study investigated whether task complexity may affect L2 speaking performance as predicted by the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2011), and whether the effect of task complexity may interact with individual differences in working memory capacity. A total of twenty Korean advanced-level EFL learners performed two separate picture description tasks, which were different in task complexity along [+/- here and now] dimension. Their working memory was measured by an L1 version of a reading span task. The results showed that there was no significant difference between Here-and-Now task (i.e., a simple task) and There-and-Then task (i.e., a complex task) in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency of English speaking performance, rejecting the prediction of the Cognition Hypothesis. Yet, it found that working memory correlated with accuracy in L2 performance on the complex task, but not on the simple task. This indicates that the effect of individual learners’ working memory capacity is observable only when a task demands a high control of attentional resources. Conversely, when a task is simple, individual differences in working memory capacity do not result in significant differences in L2 speaking performance.

Kim, Jeongyeon. 2018. “A Case Study of Nonnative English-Speaking International Students' Adjustment to a Korean University”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(1). 111~133. In the midst of intense global economic competition, institutions of higher education in many non-English-speaking societies have rigorously expanded internationalization and seen a dramatic increase of international students. This study investigated a case of nonnative English-speaking international students' adjustment to a Korean university devoted to internationalization. A mixed method was adopted to examine the relationships between adjustment and factors including perception of English as a lingua franca (ELF), perception of English-medium instruction, cultural knowledge, and perceived language proficiency. The analysis of the questionnaire responses of 132 international students and qualitative interviews with seven of the respondents revealed their negative view of EMI, which was frequently associated with the local language used in class. Their adjustment correlated significantly with the amount of the knowledge of the Korean culture and with the extent to which they would perceive English as a means of intercultural communication. Although the relationship between their view of EMI and adjustment was not significant, it was found still valid and indirect through the factor of the Korean language proficiency. Notably, in the qualitative interviews, the participants revealed limited understanding of the way interaction is framed in different local communities. These findings are discussed to propose improved support for international students of non-English-speaking higher education.