This study investigated how Korean high school students use English connectives in argumentative writing. The participants were 71 high school second year students. Analysis of data focused on three aspects of connective use: 1) the frequency and kinds of connectives used, 2) commonly used words in each category of connectives, and 3) frequently used positions of connectives. Considering the possible effect of topical knowledge and general English ability, the analysis included the comparison between two topic groups and between two language ability groups. The results showed there was a high similarity between different topic groups and ability groups in the use of connectives, but a significant difference was also found in some limited features. Based on the results, the study concludes that Korean high school students, regardless of the writing topic and language ability, share common features in the use of English connectives. Some suggestions are made for further research and writing instruction.

Grammatical complexity constitutes an indispensable subconstruct of L2 writing ability. Nonetheless, rating scale descriptors for grammatical complexity have heavily relied on degree modifiers or adjectives. Thus, this study attempts to explore the potential for the use of nominal modifiers as discriminators for adjacent levels of L2 writers in the context of an English Placement Test. This study analyzed 374 argumentative essays written by international undergraduates. Seven nominal modifiers in the developmental stages of grammatical complexity were examined and a cumulative ordinal logistic regression model with proportional odds was fitted to explore the relative effects of those grammar features on placement decisions. Four nominal modifiers were found to be positively associated with placement decisions, after adjusting for the effects of other variables. One educational implication is for the use of nominal modifiers to be incorporated into rating scale descriptors as discriminators for L2 writers who are not advanced enough to be exempted from an English Placement Test.

This study investigated EFL college students’ culture-related templates of written texts along the possibility of inter-cultural transfer. We designed a case study to explore how certain cultural assumptions contribute to EFL students’ rhetorical decisions while writing an argumentative writing. The participants were four EFL college students. Multiple data sources include background questionnaires, argumentative essays, and in-depth retrospective interviews. To analyze rhetorical choices in the participants’ writing, we identified choices of argumentation subtypes, and introduction and conclusion components. We also categorized the location of the writer’s main claim and thesis statement. The interview data were qualitatively analyzed to see what rhetorical resources participants draw from the cultural/educational contexts, and which factors had influenced the participants’ rhetorical strategy. Data analyses indicate that each participant manipulated different rhetorical structures to strengthen the rhetorical impact of their writing. Indeed, the complex constellation of individual participants’ cultural resources was at play in their L2 writing. This study contributes to our understanding of the rhetorical templates of L2 texts as constructs that are always in process, and therefore adaptable and negotiable.

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.

In argumentative writing, writers are expected to use hedged expressions and stance devices through specific linguistic expressions to convince their proposition effectively. Yet little research attention has been paid to whether the inclusion of such devices is related to the overall quality of second or foreign language learners’ argumentative writing. In this study, hedges and stance devices that are included in 28 advanced Korean EFL writers’ argumentative writing were analyzed to identify their potential relation to the overall writing quality. Analyses demonstrated that although hedges and stance devices were related to argumentative writing quality in general, the specific linguistic forms that predicted two different aspects of writing quality – formal and content quality – were different. Specifically, hedges played a significant positive role in only content quality of writing, and the specific stance devices that significantly predicted formal quality did not contribute to the content quality, and vice versa. The findings from this study provides important pedagogical implications for EFL writing instruction.

Despite extensive research attention that has been paid to second language (SL) or foreign language (FL) learners’ argumentative writing, most research has focused on the structural features characteristic of such writers. There have not been many systematic attempts to identify the quality of argument features SL or FL writers rely on, and how they contribute to the overall writing qualities. This study was designed to examine the relationship between the Toulmin elements, widely used measures of content qualities in arguments which include claims, data, warrants, rebuttals, qualifiers, and backings, and the overall qualities of advanced Korean high school EFL learners’ argumentative writing. Each of the thirty three participants’ argumentative writing was analyzed, applying the Toulmin model, and the results demonstrate that their overall argument qualities were closely related to the uses of the fundamental Toulmin elements, especially data and predicted best by the degree to which each claim was supported with relevant and sufficient data. These findings shed light on the need for instruction on the use of Toulmin elements in enhancing the overall quality of Korean EFL learners’ argumentative writing.

This study examined the use of conjunctions in Korean high school EFL learners’ writings in two discourse modes–description and argument. A corpus of seventy-six descriptive essays and eighty argumentative essays was developed, in which the essays were rated based on their cohesiveness and divided into three groups by their grades. Conjunctions were analyzed based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) framework: additive, adversative, causal, and temporal conjunctions. The results revealed different trends of using conjunctions in the two different discourse modes. The descriptive writings with high scores on cohesion tend to exhibit more conjunctions when compared to lower-quality writings, and the argumentative writings with high scores showed fewer conjunctions. The high-quality writings in descriptive mode showed highly frequent uses of additives and adversatives, while those in argumentative mode displayed a lower frequency of additives and a more frequent use of adversative however. Small numbers of causal and temporal conjunctions were used in both discourse modes, and they were particularly limited in descriptive writings regardless of the cohesiveness of writings. This implies that more explicit instructions on causal and temporal conjunctions for each mode are needed in the writing classes. In addition, the scores on cohesion were significantly lower for the descriptive essays than for the argumentative essays, and a much narrower range of conjunctions was employed in descriptive writing. These results suggest a more balanced focus on various discourse modes of writing and the introduction of conjunctions that are appropriate for each mode, since the ability to use conjunctions in one mode does not seem to be automatically transferred to another mode in high school EFL learners’ writings.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of task complexity on the quality of L2 learners’ argumentative writing using both global measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) and task-specific measures, namely, for conjunctions. A group of 110 Korean high school students in South Korea performed either a simple or complex argumentative writing task. Task complexity was manipulated by +/–reasoning demands and +/–few elements. A set of 110 argumentative essays were analyzed on 6 global measures of CAF and 2 task-specific measures. The results showed that task complexity affected the fluency of the argumentative writings, in that the complex task group produced more fluent writings than the simple group. However, task complexity did not affect accuracy or syntactic complexity of the argumentative writings. In the task-specific measures, task complexity affected neither frequency nor target-like use of conjunctions. These results have pedagogical implications for task design to help learners develop their L2 proficiency.

Despite previous research on the use of the first-person pronoun in academic writing, it has rarely been studied in L2 writing and learner corpus research. In this study, the pronoun I was analyzed and compared between native speaking (NS) and Korean nonnative speaking (NNS) corpora of English argumentative writing samples. To identify differences in its discourse functions, three categories (essay commentator, experience provider and opinion provider) were formulated. The findings show that the normalized frequency of the pronoun was higher in the learner corpus. However, the pronoun occurred less frequently within individual essays but was found in more essays. Unlike the NS corpus, the opinion provider occurs more frequently than the experience provider in the learner corpus. For the opinion provider, Korean students usually selected the verb think. The present study suggests the need to develop students’ awareness of the discursive usage of the pronoun and expand their repertoire of metadiscursive devices.

The present study investigates Korean university EFL students’ use of conjunctive adverbials (CAs) in argumentative writing. The data for the study consist of a Korean university students’ writing corpus that is divided into three different subcorpora based on proficiency levels, and a reference corpus of American students’ writings. The results show that the nonnative writers in all three groups greatly overused CAs. Examination of their overuse patterns according to different taxonomic types indicated that sequential and additive types were mostly overused, as much as six times more than those by the native writers. In addition, several characteristics of the nonnative writers’ CA usage are discussed, including their heavy dependence on sentence-initial positioning, and both form-related and usage-related misuses of CAs, especially among the lowest-level learners. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications and suggestions.

This study aims to analyze the process of how Chinese students practice collaborative writing and to figure out whether collaborative writing is useful to Korean language learners for academic purposes. In total, 15 Chinese students of Korean language for academic purposes participated in the research and they were divided into Groups A and B, respectively. Five participants of Group A were individually assigned with writing tasks while ten participants of Group B conducted collaborative writing tasks in pairs. Groups A and B conducted both tasks of a data commentary and an argumentative essay. The result was that fluency and complexity were not significantly different between Groups A and B. However, accuracy was higher in Group B. Accordingly, for students of Korean language in an advanced level, collaborative writing activities did not result in longer texts or more complex linguistic practices but led to more accurate texts. Whether this accuracy will strengthen grammatical knowledge of language students in an advanced level in the long-term is unknown, so follow-up studies are needed.

This study investigated whether two different writing tasks (narrative and argumentative), elicit different lexical features. This study also attempted to identify the relationship between lexical features and the level of writing proficiency. Seventyeight university students wrote one narrative and one argumentative essay, with a 30-minute time limit for each task. A total of 156 essays were rated by eight raters using holistic rubrics, and then were divided into three levels of writing proficiency. The written products were analyzed for nine lexical variables: mean word length,Type/Token Ratio, Root TTR (RTTR), Corrected TTR (CTTR), lexical density, the most frequent 1000-word families, the second most frequent 1000-word families,academic word list, and lexical frequency. The main findings are twofold. First,paired t-test analysis revealed significant differences between the two discourse modes in eight lexical variables. Second, the results of one-way ANOVA, Welch ANOVA, and Pearson’s correlation analysis indicated that RTTR and CTTR best discriminated between the different writing proficiency groups.

This paper examines how Korean college EFL students use contrastive conjunctions in their argumentative writing in comparison with native speaker college students’ use of them. The data consists of a Korean college students’ writing corpus, which was divided into a lower proficiency group and a higher proficiency group, and an American and British university students’ writing corpus. The findings reveal that the first two most frequently occurring forms are but and however in all four groups,although the usage patterns such as positioning differ between the NS and the NNS groups. The third most frequent form is on the other hand in both NNS groups and yet in both NS groups, which shows an interesting difference in that the NNS groups hardly use yet in their writing. Both NNS groups also show frequent misuses of conjunctive adverbials such as in contrast, on the contrary, and on the other hand. The paper concludes with some pedagogical implications and suggestions.

This study aims to investigate how Korean EFL college students' argumentative essays are similar to or different from those of native English speakers (NES) in the use of reference, with the consideration of Korean students' level of Engli sh proficiency. It employed both quantitative and qualitative analyses to examine referential use for estab lishing textual cohesion of wri tten discourse. The participants were 30 native English speakers and 61 Korean EFL college students, with 31 high proficiency students and 30 low proficiency students. Detai led examination on the use of referential devices revealed important findings. For example, the syntactic role of the reference influenced the relative difficulty for the Korean EFL students. When referring to nominal items, whereas the Korean EFL students did as well as the NES in referential choices in subject positions, they underused references in other syntactic roles, such as object and possessive positions. They also made different referential choices in one of the major functions of demonstratives. That is, whereas the NES mostly used demonstrative this when referring to extended text in the preced ing discourse, both levels of the Korean EFL students preferred pronoun it for such function. The present study holds important pedagogical implications with regard to L2 writing pedagogy.

MBL은 학생들에게 정확하고 효율적인 데이터 수집과 실시간 그래프를 제공함으로써 실험 시간을 단축시켜, 실험 결과에 대한 깊이 있는 토론을 가능하게 함으로 탐구의 본질적 특징인 의사소통과정을 강조한다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 과학 탐구와 탐구의 본질적 특징인 의사소통의 관점에서 중등학교 지구과학 MBL수업의 양상을 살펴보았다. 3개의 MBL수업을 녹화한 비디오 테잎을 주된 자료원으로 하였으며, 수업 녹화물과 전사본을 교실탐구 기본요소와 논의 요소틀을 이용하여 분석하였다. 교실탐구의 기본요소는 "문제제기", "증거수집", "설명형성", "과학지식과의 연결", "이론의 발표"의 5가지이다. 연구 결과로 첫째, 세 수업은 각 진행 단계별로 탐구 요소와 그 수준에서 유사한 양상을 보여주었다. 학생들은 교사 주도적 문제 제기로부터, 절차에 따른 증거 수집을 하고, 교사의 지도에 따라 설명을 형성하며, 특정 과학지식을 사용하도록 안내되었다. 하지만, 이론의 발표 요소는 1개의 수업에서만 관찰되었다. 둘째, 탐구의 본질적 측면으로서 논의적 의사소통은 매우 드물게 나타났다. 논의 과정을 포함한 담화 에피소드는 과학적 현상을 다루기보다 실험 과정이나 절차적 측면에 관해 이루어졌다 이론의 발표가 진행된 수업에서 1개의 에피소드만이 과학현상과 관련된 활발한 논의적 의사소통을 보여주었다. 결론적으로 MBL자료가 탐구의 본질적 특징인 의사소통을 강조한다 하더라도, 실제 수업에서 진정한 탐구의 모습을 구현하는 일은 쉽지 않다는 것을 알 수 있다. 따라서 MBL수업에서 탐구 및 논의적 의사소통을 구현하기 위해서는 학생들에게 논의의 기회 제공과 더불어 논의를 유의미하게 개진할 수 있는 교사의 적절한 도움이 필요하다.

Various studies have been conducted to minimize the subjectivity and increase the accuracy in assessing written texts, and the present study focused on the scoring rubrics which were the basic criteria for evaluating writing. Three different scoring rubrics (holistic, analytic and multiple-trait scoring method) were compared in evaluating argumentative essays written by Korean high school students. The present study aims to investigate the rater-reliability of the three scoring methods, holistic, analytic, and multiple-trait scoring methods. Scores of the five raters which were obtained from using the three scoring methods were compared. It was found that there were significant mean differences in the three scoring methods. Raters gave the relatively low scores when they used the holistic scoring. Next, the highest inter-rater reliability was found in the multiple-trait scoring. All the three scoring methods showed an acceptable level of reliability above .07. However, raters showed the highest reliability when they used a multiple-trait scoring rubric. Also, high correlation was found among components of analytic and multiple-trait scoring methods, indicating that the multiple-trait scoring rubric can replace the analytic scoring rubric. Finally, raters expressed a favor over the multiple-trait scoring. The result of this study suggests some implications for writing assessment in Korean secondary English classes.

이 연구는 고등학생을 대상으로 쓰기 하위 수준에 속하는 논증 텍스트의 의미 구조를 분석하여 하위 수준 학생들에게 적합한 교육 지도 방안을 마련하려는 목적으로 시행되었다. 이를 위해 2020년 10월부터 11월에 걸쳐 대전 소재 고등학교 2학년 학생 중 참여 의사를 밝힌 87명의 글을 수집하였으며 이들 중 하위 30%에 속하는 26편의 글을 최종적으로 분석하였다. 그 결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 논증 쓰기 하위 수준 텍스트에는 주제문에 해당하는 '핵'이 불분명하므로 글을 쓰기 전 논제에 대한 입장을 명확하게 제시하고 글 쓰기에 임해야 함을 지도해야 한다. 둘째, 쓰기 하위 수준 학생들은 찬반이 분명히 정해진 논증글에서 상반된 의견이 모두 존재하는 일관성 없는 글을 작성 하기 쉬우므로 중심을 두는 '핵'을 분명히 설정한 뒤, 반대되는 측면의 내용은 '양보'나 '반론'의 관계가 명확하게 드러나도록 그 표현과 양을 조절할 수 있게 교육해야 한다. 셋째, 쓰기 하위 수준 학생들은 '증거'의 효력이 상실된 내용을 논거로 제시하는 경우가 많으므로, 감정적인 호소의 내용보다 객관적이거나 구체적인 사실 및 자료로 그 신뢰성과 타당성을 높여야 함을 지도해야 한다. 넷째, 쓰기 하위 수준 학생의 글은 '증거'의 내용이 현저히 부족하므로 내용을 생성하여 충분히 논제를 뒷받침할 수 있도록 하는 전략을 지도해야 한다. 다섯째, 유기적인 연결성을 상실한 채 의미 없이 나열된 표현들이 발견되는 경우에는 문단별 중심 의미를 확인하고 그 내용 상 중복되는 부분이나 삭제해야하는 부분이 없는지 확인하도록 한다. 이 연구를 통해 논증글 하위 수준 글 구성 방식을 이해하고 개선을 위한 지도 방안을 제시하여 교육 현장에 기여할 수 있게 되기를 기대해 본다.