This study investigates whether a natural order exists for non-native acquisition in the production of English syllable coda obstruents by Korean and Chinese adult native speakers. We recorded L2 English monosyllabic words produced by 66 Chinese and 51 Korean native speakers. The recorded speech was then evaluated by 11 native-speaker listeners of English to determine the accuracy of coda consonants. The results showed that in both Chinese and Korean languages, the mean proportion of L2 forms was consistently ordered across all groups of different proficiencies: Substitution > Insertion > Deletion. Our results support the Natural Order Hypothesis that non-native phonology has the same general order, no matter what might be the language proficiency of the learners or the learners’ native language. However, the results do not support the view that this order is the acquisition sequence or the difficulty order. Other findings include that non-native phonology operates according to recoverability rather than transfer or markedness.

The study investigates to what extent a commitment to and a self-evaluation of a specific self-directed learning activity explain Korean college students’ EFL proficiency (using TOEIC reading scores). Of the Korean college students who participated, 52 completed log writing of self-directed learning activities, and 44 completed a self-evaluating survey and submitting a TOEIC reading score. Through statistical analyses, including correlations and regressions, the study finds that the number of minutes spent on reading aloud explained 10% of the variances of participants’ TOEIC reading scores. Another finding of the study is that perceived effectiveness of note-taking for grammar learning on listening and perceived manageability of reading aloud explained 21% of the variances in TOEIC reading scores. On the basis of these results, the study proposes that commitment to reading aloud and learner-perceived effectiveness of note-taking for grammar learning on listening can function as significant predictors for EFL reading proficiency. Several practical suggestions are provided for EFL instructors and researchers for the more effective use of self-directed learning activities and self-evaluation results.

The purpose of the study is to investigate whether critical thinking skills can be fostered through a college English course. Approximately eighty female Korean students taking a basic freshman mandatory reading course participated in the study. The researcher taught them critical reading skills along with other reading comprehension skills and provided them with Korean local context in the given topic. The students critically read two units of the required textbook and attended presentations of high school students with minority cultural backgrounds. The students submitted four online reports about multiculturalism, and they were analyzed using a thematic analysis. The results revealed that even students with relatively low English proficiency could enhance their critical thinking skills by practicing critical reading. Also, additional information about local contexts not only compensated for a culturally limited text but also facilitated the development of critical thinking. The findings indicate that teaching critical thinking is feasible in an English language course despite limited environments. Yet, more studies are required to generalize the findings.

Employing Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Grammar approach, the present study examines the Korean EFL college students’ way of organizing thematic structures in written English texts, with special focus on the influence of learner proficiency. A total of 150 learners’ argumentative essays consisting of 50 essays each from three levels of learner groups were compared with 50 essays from its native counterparts, with inquiry focused on the thematic selection, usage of various theme features, and semantic distribution of topical themes. The results show that textual themes, multiple themes, and first person pronouns as topical themes are highly overused in the learner texts compared to the native essays. Overall, the level of proficiency significantly affects learners’ choices regarding thematic structures although the enhanced proficiency does not involve the improvement in all aspects of thematic organization. From these findings, it is suggested that the EFL writing pedagogy should pay greater attention to the effective use of thematic organization as a means of enhancing textual coherence and embrace level-specific instructions.

This study investigates the core competencies required of Korean secondary-school English teachers and how they perceive these competencies in terms of importance, applicability, and teachers’ competency level ahead of implementing the 2015 revised national English curriculum in secondary schools. After the literature research, interviews, and expert review processes, five core competencies were extracted: curriculum and content reorganization competency; learner-centered teaching competency; innovative assessment competency; multicultural (intercultural) education competency; and information literacy and ICT use. From the results of a survey administered to 93 secondary school English teachers, it was found that the perceived competency level was lower than required, but it was higher than applicability. Overall, teachers felt insecure about how to apply the required competencies to their lessons. There was also a difference between middle school teachers and high school teachers in the self-rating results. These results provide implications for teacher preparation and the direction of teacher education toward the successful implementation of the 2015 revised curriculum.

The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean college students’ syntactic development, especially the order of acquisition in terms of the types of the sentences and clauses written in English essays. Eighty-six Korean female college students in Seoul participated in this study. For research method, the students wrote English essays with the given topic through the test web site. The essays were scored on a scale of one to six., and then were divided into three proficiency groups. After that, the students’ essays were analyzed and counted by types of sentences/clauses and frequency: simple/compound/complex sentences and nominal/adverbial/adjective clauses. The findings revealed significant differences in the frequency of different types of clauses by students’ English levels. The results showed that the amount of sentences/clauses based on the level of English proficiency was quite different. In particular, significant differences were found in the use of the complex sentences and subordinate clauses by levels. In addition, the use of adjective (relative) clauses was prominent only in the advanced level. Teaching implications were discussed and future research suggestions were made at the end of the paper.

Yu, Kyong-Ae. 2017. “Perceptions and Functions of Korean Mianhada: Comparison with American English Sorry”. The Sociolingusitc Journal of Korea 25(2), 197~224. Sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic conventions for apology vary from culture to culture. While the illocutionary purpose of apologizing in English is “the speaker's sense of social obligation” (Wierzbicka 1987: 215~217) and Japanese sumimasen involves “social-self with a social alter” (Ide 1998: 524), this study argues that Korean mianhada is an apology from the speaker's moral perspective linked with collective-self. Employing Wierzbicka's (1987) Natural Semantic Metalanguage, this study discusses that sorry is a separate concept but mianhada is a nebulous concept mixed with other emotions, e.g., thank and love. In addition, presenting the examples from corpus-based dictionaries, COCA, and the Sejong 21st Century Corpus, this study discusses that sorry is authentically used as indirect and ritualistic apologies while mianhada is used as direct, indirect, ritualistic and substantive apologies. Finally, distinguishing main functions of mianhada into a sincere apology, a pseudo-apology, gratitude, a request initiator, a preclosing signal, and a territory invasion signal to strangers, this study provides cultural and ethnographical explanations.

This study aims to investigate the interaction patterns between the teacher and students or among students themselves in a Korean elementary English classroom by analysing classroom talk and by focusing on the types of the teacher’s questions and feedback as well as the use of L1 and L2. This analysis is used to determine the influence of such interaction on the students’ communicative skills in English. A female teacher in Gyeonggi province and a 6th-grade class participated in the data collection. This study included data from video or audio recordings, interviews, field notes, self-assessments, and portfolios. The transcribed data were analysed using Tsui’s (1994) framework and Verplaetse’s (1995, 2000) coding system. The results of this analysis indicated that the interaction patterns varied between participants into three groups: teacher-initiated talk (e.g., T-S talk) vs students-initiated talk (e.g., S-T talk & S-S talk). At the beginning stage of lesson, the teacher-initiated talk made up the majority of talk in English, and facilitated the students’ involvement in classroom learning including their language use. In the S-S talk, the students were involved in interaction which occurred naturally without the teacher’s control.

As emphasis has increased on English as an international language and on the globalized image of universities, the number of native English speaker teachers (NETs) has also increased in Korean universities. From the poststructuralist view, teacher identity is constructed through participation in valued activities of the community of practice, and it is not fixed but constantly negotiated through the interaction of the context (Wenger, 1998). While previous studies focused on nonnative English speaker teachers’ identity construction, little attention has been paid to NETs in the EFL context. Considering the need to explore teacher identity from recent theoretical perspectives, the present study investigates how NETs negotiate conflicting identities and construct their teacher identities in the Korean university context. The findings show the NETs constructed multiple identities of an English educator, a collaborative volunteer, a non-tenured instructor, and a cultural and linguistic outsider, and they legitimize their professor identity through their participation in the present and imagined community of competent teachers. The findings support the claim that teacher identity is embedded in the sociocultural context that interacts with the individual agency in making sense of who they are. Implications and suggestions of the study are addressed based on the findings.

The purpose of this research is to explore the interaction patterns in an English (L2)-mediated Mandarin Chinese (L3) class (native-taught) for young monolingual Korean (L1) learners. Twenty-nine class videos were collected and transcribed into 152 pages of Chinese, English, and Korean for this analysis. The interaction patterns in the English-mediated Chinese classes were analyzed using the IRF framework of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) and Tsui (1994). The results and discussions were integrated into four main patterns to interpret the English-mediated Chinese classes: 1) the native Chinese teacher’s needs for class assistance, 2) the students’ enthusiastic but inadequate use of English, 3) the students’ voluntary Korean scaffolding, and 4) the students’ class participation needs. On the one hand, this research has provided the students’ response to the teacher’s use of Chinese and English (in a foreign language-only environment), which is intended for a better understanding of a classroom with a trilingual teacher and monolingual students. On the other hand, the research has implications for understanding use of an L2 to facilitate an L3 classroom, particularly in the situation of using two foreign languages in one classroom.

This qualitative study, grounded in the sociocultural perspective, attempts to explore a Korean English teacher’s identity construction by employing a self-study, through narrative inquiry. As a self-study, the participant, Sofia, will also be the researcher. Data from her teacher life story narrative and reflective journals were analyzed to see how she reconstructs her identity through reflection of her own experiences. The study revealed four major themes showing the identity formation of the participant: (1) identity formation by resisting identity assumptions or stereotypes; (2) identity formation through influence of context; (3) identity formation through previous learning experiences; and (4) identity formation through conceptualizing teacher as professional. Based on these findings, the present study generates implications for teacher education practice and future research.

The induction experiences of novice teachers are receiving increasing attention within the subject field of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).The process of beginning to teach is acknowledged to be complex and often fraught with tensions and anxieties for newly qualified teachers who may experience significant disjunction between the realities of classroom and institutional life and what they have been taught on pre-service training courses. Research has also shown that novice teachers can be helped to make a successful transition from the teacher-training environment to the school through well-designed induction programs which provide structured support and professional development with access to resources beyond the school itself. This article seeks to uncover whether these elements of well-designed induction programs are replicated for teachers of English in the Korean school system. Using data gathered in interviews with recently graduated teachers, the article examines the experiences of teaching in the early years and documents teachers’ own perceptions of their induction into teaching. The article discusses the place of the teachers within the social network of the school and, in so doing, hopes to foreground how individuals come to terms with the new and complex roles inherent in ‘being a teacher’ within this framework. This is a perspective particularly necessary for TEFL as a discipline where methods are so often deemed paramount in learning to teach, rather than an understanding of what it means to be a teacher of English as a foreign language in a particular socio-educational context.

There are grammatical markers of tense that are obligatory in English and Korean, ho wever, these grammatical temporal forms are absent in Chinese. Although it is uncontrov ersial that Chinese does not morphologically encode tense, there are several other ways in which temporal information can be encoded (Smith&Erbaugh, 2005). Chinese is an aspect system language which marks aspect. On the contrast, English is a tense system languag e which marks tense. In our review of languages considered in this study, the main focus will be on aspect system and tense system which are illustrated by Chinese, English and Korean. The author will illustrate that the tense and aspect system of Chinese is different from that of Korean and English. Our argument in this paper focuses on three categories which can be referred to as the present, past and future. In chapter one, the motive of re search that difference of aspect and tense expression in Chinese, English and Korea was introduced and the course of this research was mentioned. A contrasting study was conducted in chapter two. As for contrasting the characteristics of three languages, the author hope that this paper would help to learn Chinese, English or Korean easily.

Shim, Young-Sook. 2016. “A Study on Semantic Relation of English Loanwords with Their Corresponding Korean Words”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 24(3). 281~316. The premise underlying the Korean language “purification” by way of replacing loanwords with Korean existing words is that loanwords and their corresponding Korean words occupy nearly identical semantic domains and thus are interchangeable. Few studies, however, have been conducted to verify this premise. This study aims to investigate the semantic relation of English loanwords with their corresponding Korean words recommended for purification of the Korean language. From the database consisting of news articles in the economy section of Korean newspapers, six loanwords were chosen for an in-depth analysis. With Trends 21 Corpus and Naver being primary tools, the loanwords and their corresponding Korean words are analyzed in terms of frequency, co-occurrence, collocation, and usage. The findings show that the loanwords semantically relate to their corresponding Korean words in various ways, with the words across the pairs presenting varying degrees of semantic likeness, difference, and inclusion. Suggestions for further research are provided based on the findings.

This paper adopts a multi-factorial analysis and investigates English dative alternations in Korean EFL learners’ writings, by directly comparing dative alternations of native speakers and those of Korean EFL learners’ writings. Two corpora were chosen for the comparison: the Switchboard corpus (written sections) and the Korean component of the TOEFL11 corpus. After all the sentences with dative alternations were extracted from these two corpora, and seventeen linguistic factors were manually encoded, the data were statistically analyzed in R. This paper was theoretically based on the concept of interlanguage in the Second Language Acquisition and Competition Model of Bates and MacWhinney (1982, 1989). Through the analysis, the following facts were observed: (i) the Korean EFL learners used ditransitive constructions more frequently than prepositional constructions, (ii) eight main factors and four interactions with the L1 were statistically significant, and (iii) the ditransitive constructions which the Korean EFL learners used were closer to the prepositional constructions rather than the ditransitive constructions in Korean.

이 논문은 오늘날 ‘단색화’로 명명되는 한국 추상화의 한 경향에 대한 세 개의 반성적 질문을 던 지고, 그에 대한 답을 모색하고자 한다. 첫째 질문은 단색화를 진정 독자적인 유파로서, 긴밀한 이념과 그 실천의 집약체로서 형성된 한국적 미술운동 또는 유파로 볼 수 있는가이다. 둘째 질문은 오늘날까지 관례적 정설로 자리 잡아 온 견해로서 ‘단색화는 진정 한국성 또는 한 국적 미의 반영인가’이다. 셋째 질문은 단색화의 거의 공식화된 영문표기인 ‘Dansaekhwa’와 그것을 정당화하는 담론 은 타당한가이다.

사람의 필적(handwriting)은 필자의 내면 심리상태를 의식적으로 나 무의식적으로 표현하고 있으며 이는 동서양을 막론하고 오랜 시간 경험론적 방법으로 확인되고 있는 사실이다. 특히 서양에서는 르네상 스를 거치면서 심리학, 정신분석학 등 타 학문과의 연관을 통해 필적학 (graphology)이란 학문이 확립되어 왔다. 필적학은 필적을 통해 필자의 심리상태, 성격, 생활이나 인간관계에 대한 사전 정보획득 등을 통 해 직원채용이나 적절한 업무 배정, 범죄사건에서 심리정보 획득 등 다 양한 일상적 영역에 적용되어 활용되어 오고 있다. 본 논문은 영어를 중심으로 활용되고 있는 필적학의 개념을 차용하 여 한글에 도입함으로써 한글에서의 필적학 전개의 틀을 마련해 보고자 했다. 영어와 한글이 동일한 기준으로 평가할 수 있는 근거는 백지 용지에 좌에서 우로, 그리고 오른손에 의해 필기가 되었다면 한글 필적 도 영어 필적과 보편타당하게 적용될 수 있다고 할 수 있기 때문이다. 연구 결과 한글 필적에서도 영어 필적 분석의 특징과 같이 여백의 특 징, 기준선의 개념 특징, 공간의 특징, 기울기의 특징, 글자 사이즈의 특 징 등이 동일하게 나타나고 있다. 또한 필기 속도와 필압 특징도 나타나 고 있음을 확인할 수 있었다. 한편 자음이 있는 한글은 특징에 따라 영 문 필적과는 다른 모습들을 확인할 수 있었다. 특히 “ㄱ”, “ㅜ”, “ㅣ” 이 특이하게 아래로 길게 내리는 필적이 관찰되기도 한다. 결국 한글 필적은 영문 필적의 특징 분류법과 비교할 때 다수의 동일한 특징을 가지고 있으며, 자음이 있는 한글의 특성에 따라 한글만의 상이한 특징도 가지고 있다는 점을 확인할 수 있었다. 이는 한글 필 적도 보편적 연역법, 심리학, 정신의학 등을 적용하고 실험적 방법을 통해 개인의 심리를 분석할 수 있다는 가능성을 보여주고 있는 것이며 이런 분석적, 실험적 방법의 적용 등을 통해 필적학이란 학문의 틀을 확립해 나갈 수 있는 가능성을 확인할 수 있었다.

This study investigated L2 production, perception, and the relation of production and perception by examining 20 Korean learners’ production and perception of the English contrasts of /ʃ/ vs. /ʃi/, /ʧ/ vs. /ʧi/, and /ʤ/ vs. /ʤi/ in word final position. Of the 20 Korean learners, 10 (5 males, 5 females) were low in English proficiency and the other 10 (5 males, 5 females) were high. Our findings from production and perception experiments showed that the relation of L2 production and perception varies according to learners’ proficiency levels in L2. A significant correlation between L2 production and perception was attested within the high group learners. Thus, the high group learners with higher production accuracy generally exhibited higher perception accuracy. Unlike the high group, the low group learners’ production and perception patterns did not show any significant correlation between the two. In general, the low group displayed higher accuracy in production than in perception. In addition, within the low group, the heavy influence of L1 constraints on L2 perception was attested while L2 production was not in accordance with L1 phonology.

The purpose of this study is to investigate university students’ perceptions on their English conversation classes taught by native English speakers. Its focus is on finding out how well the students understand and how actively they participate in class, what causes difficulty in their understanding or participation in class, and whether their class helps them in terms of affective aspects and English skills. A survey was conducted on a total of 465 university students in Korea, and the collected data were analyzed to compute basic descriptive and inferential statistics. Some of the important findings are 1) over 50% of the students understand their classes well; 2) a little over 30% actively participate in class; 3) about 30~50% of the students perceive their class help them affectively; and 4) about 50% of the students perceive their class help them improve their English skills in general. These results are discussed along with other findings related to the causes of the difficulties that the students experienced. Suggestions are provided on the basis of the results and their implications.