This paper investigates Korean EFL students’ learning (de)motivation factors according to the level of students’ English learning motivation. A total of 41 undergraduate students reflected on their past ten years of English learning experiences and submitted autobiographic essays with ‘motigraph,’ marking their annual changes of English learning motivation from 0 to 10. The data were analyzed with Grounded Theory. The findings revealed that the factors that increased or decreased English learning motivation were different according to students’ level of motivation. Students with low-level motivation were influenced by their teacher or parents, while those with high-level motivation were influenced by their past L2 learning experiences perceived positively by themselves. In both groups, the factors of emotional experiences caused by negative L2 learning experiences were the main reasons for demotivation. This paper emphasizes the importance of subjective appraisal in maintaining students’ L2 learning motivation and recovering from the state of demotivation.

The purpose of this study is to examine how cohesion features can be used to distinguish between essays written by Korean and NS college students. A total of 800 essays from the ICNALE (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus were analyzed using the newly-developed automated analysis of cohesion program, TAACO (the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion). In order to examine whether there are statistically significant differences between NS and Korean students, a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted. The multivariate test result showed that the combined cohesion indices were significantly affected by L1, indicating that Korean and NS students differed in terms of various cohesion indices. A stepwise discriminant function analysis was also carried out to characterize the nature of cohesion differences in essays between NS and Korean students. The best two predictors for distinguishing between Korean students’ essays and NS students’ essays are the overlap of function words and the use of demonstratives. Overall, NS students produced a more cohesive writing than Korean students in that they employed overlapping words, demonstratives, and lexical subordinators as a way to connect ideas across sentences. Implications of this study for English writing pedagogy are discussed.