Jeong, Ye-Eun, Kim, Seung-Rae, Choi, Min-Gyeong, Shin, Eun-Jee, Kim, Dong-Wan, & Cho, Tae-Rin. (2023). “Refining Social Strata Variables in Korean Sociolinguistic Variation Research”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 31(4), 33-69. This paper critically assesses existing studies on Korean language variation by social strata, proposing alternative approaches to address issues related to these variables. Previous researches have involved papers hierarchically categorizing social strata variables based on common perceptions or assigning weights to them arbitrarily. However, the impact of social strata variables and their weights on language variation remains unknown without thorough data collection and statistical analysis. Consequently, we emphasize the need for a more comprehensive presentation of social strata variables through an interdisciplinary approach taking into account sociological, economic, and political foundations, and stress the necessity of statistical test, observing the influence of each variable on linguistic forms through regression models

The purpose of this study is to point out the problems of Korean language policy and education through some phenomena of variation and change in Korean language, and to show how they should go in the future. Since language policy and education are directly related to the status of language, in Chapter 2 we outline the current status and situation of Korean. In Chapter 3, we examine some of the variations and changes in Korean language, which are highly interesting from a social perspective. Based on these results, in Chapter 4, we present the direction of Korean policy and education as ‘rich and just Korean’. So far, the key direction of policy and education for the Korean language has been ‘window-dressing language policy’ and ‘window-dressing language education’. They have attempted to refine Korean by simplifying and abstracting the various language facts and disregarding of the elements that seemed not to be beautiful. The language policy and education caught up in the ‘beautiful Korean’ obsession have lasted for decades in Korean. Now Korean speakers should be liberated from ‘beautiful and pure Korean’ ideology. We should pay more attention to local dialects, North Korean words, slang and buzzwords, and net languages. We need to accept new concepts through contact with other languages. With its diversity, richness, and political correctness, Korean will be able to keep its place firmly in the strong waves of English and grow into an important language of the world.

The purpose of this study was to investigate changes of language anxiety in EFL classroom and relation between the change in anxiety and learners’ performance. The participants were 76 first-year non-English majors from various disciplines of a Korean university. Demographic information questionnaire, English performance test, and Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale were administered to the participants at two time points during a 12-week interval. Mean differences of quantitative data from Time 1 and Time 2, effects of gender and self-perceived proficiency level on anxiety, and the relationship between anxiety and performance were statistically analyzed. The results revealed significant decrease in English anxiety over time, significant effect of self-perceived proficiency level on anxiety, and negative correlation between variation of anxiety level and successful performance. This study suggests that reducing learners’ anxiety level might help their language improvement, and self-perceived language proficiency might be correlated to changes in language anxiety in EFL classroom. Possible implications for English instructors and limitations for future research were presented.