This study investigates the role of age of first exposure in the acquisition and processing of English articles in an EFL setting. Fifty advanced Korean learners of English participated in a grammatical acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task. The participants were divided into two groups depending on the initial age at which they were constantly exposed to English at least 3 hours per week (‘early group’ < 12; ‘late group’ ≥ 12). No significant performance differences were observed between the two groups in the judgment task. However, meaningful differences were found between the reading behaviors of the two groups in the self-paced reading task. These findings show that the learners’ age of first exposure has a significant impact on learners’ performance when the ability to process English articles in real-time is evaluated. In contrast, it has much less impact on learners’ performance on a task which tests explicit knowledge under no time-limit condition.

This study investigated the effects of two types of corrective feedback (CF), recasts and metalinguistic feedback (implicit vs. explicit CF), on the development of implicit and explicit knowledge of English articles. It also examined the relationship between learners’ language aptitude, in particular language analytic ability, and their knowledge development through different types of CF. Six intact intermediate communication English classes (a total of 104 students and two English-speaking teachers) at a university participated in the present study. In CF groups, learners received recasts or metalinguistic feedback (MF) to the errors of the English articles during communicative activities, while no CF was given to the control group. The study employed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design, and four different tests were used to measure learner implicit and explicit knowledge. The study found both recasts and MF effective in the development of implicit knowledge and selective effects of recasts on the improvement of explicit knowledge. This suggests that both implicit and explicit CF bring about the development of implicit and explicit knowledge. In addition, language analytic ability was found to be closely related to learners’ gains through both CF and development of explicit and implicit knowledge of English articles.

The study investigates the relative effects of two types of indirect written corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of English articles. Thirty-five high intermediate Korean EFL college students who were enrolled in three composition classes participated in this study. After the instruction on the English article usage, three classes (Class A, Class B, and Class C) received different types of feedback on their blog writings over the course of a semester. Both Class A and Class B received indirect feedback in the form of underlining errors. In the following class, Class A received correct forms with metalinguistic information for the errors revised incorrectly, but Class B did not have such opportunities. The Class C received no feedback. The results showed that only Class A, which received indirect feedback plus correct forms with metalinguistic information, made a statistically significant gain from the 3 sessions of feedback treatment. Pedagogical implications were provided on the basis of the findings.

The role of oral corrective feedback (CF) in second language (L2) learning has been extensively investigated. However, little attention has been given to the relationship between different types of CF and explicit/implicit L2 knowledge. For this reason, the present study explored the effects of recasts and metalinguistic feedback on the development of explicit and implicit knowledge of the English articles. Sixty-three university students enrolled in intermediate Communication English classes participated, and they were assigned into a metalinguistic group, a recast group, and a control group. While the students engaged in meaning-based activities (i.e., retelling stories), the feedback groups received respective CF on the errors of English articles and the control group did not receive any feedback. Untimed grammatical judgement tests were employed to measure the students’ improvement of explicit knowledge and elicitation oral imitation tests were used to examine their gains of implicit knowledge. The study found that both recasts and metalinguistic feedback equally facilitated the development of explicit knowledge over time. However, they were not as effective as in the improvement of implicit knowledge, showing a short-term effect on the development.

This research aims to review and analyse articles on listening comprehension published in English Teaching over the past 50 years. A total of 71 such research articles were published from 1965 to 2015 in the journal, and they were analysed from the following five perspectives: I) historical trends in listening research, 2) main topic areas of the papers, 3) research subjects' levels, and 4) research methodology. The results of this review study are as follows. First, the volume of listening research gradually increased over the first 40 years ofthe journal's history, but it has dropped drastically over the past decade. Second, 'listening strategies' and 'evaluation' were researchers' favoured topics, while listening research on pronunciation has been actively conducted in recent years. Third, research with university students outnumbered research done with elementary and secondary students. Finally, research using quantitative methods dominated the research methodology. A sharp decline in the number of articles on listening research in recent years and unbalanced research in terms of its topic, subjects' levels, and research methodology are noteworthy.

This paper overviews English language assessment-related articles published in English Teaching from 1965 to 2015. One hundred thirty-eight articles are chosen for analysis, and the discernible trends epitomizing a specific era are traced. The results show articles concerning item analysis and improvement oftesting methods constituted a major portion of the periodical in the early days. The number of the assessmentrelated articles began to soar from the late 1980s, and recently a major focus seems to have shifted to test validity. In terms of research topics, a significant body of research has been conducted on item analysis, improvement of testing practices, performance assessment, evaluation methods, and test validity. Even though the overall level of the articles has advanced dramatically over the past 50 years, little research has been intended in the areas of classroom assessment, English language testing policies, washback effects, new assessment tools, and the validity of national tests. This paper concludes with a suggestion that more efforts should be made to fill the gap between research and testing practices in the field.

This study investigates variation in article use by Korean secondary school students of English. The study shows how two different tasks affect variation with respect to article types (a, the, and zero), proficiency level and the semantic feature, specificity. One task, a wide domain task, focused on grammar in general and the narrow domain task focused on articles. The statistical results showed that the subjects performed significantly better on the narrow domain task than on the wide domain task. The subjects showed significant differences among the three articles in the wide domain task, while they did not in the narrow domain task. The subjects performed significantly better with non-specific DPs (Determiner Phrases) than with specific DPs in the wide domain task, but reversed results were revealed in the narrow domain task. The present study presents some finding that grammatical domain plays a role as a variable for variability and shows that different tasks on the same research topic may produce different findings.

This paper investigated the role of specificity by Korean learners in processing the article choice parameter. To this end, Korean learners of EFL completed the online and the offline semantic acceptability-rating tasks. The online results indicated that the Korean learners of EFL at both the advanced and the intermediate level of the proficiency fluctuated between the specificity and definiteness parameter settings. Especially for the intermediate Korean learners of EFL, the response time of the [-definite, +specific] condition showed little difference from other conditions, implying that they adhered to the definiteness parameter setting. The offline results, in contrast, indicated that the Korean learners of EFL at both the advanced and the intermediate level of the proficiency adhered to the definiteness parameter setting. It seems that there is a possibility that the intermediate learners were adopting the definiteness parameter setting, which is different from the claims made in Ionin, Ko and Wexler’s (2004) specificity hypothesis.