The purpose of this study is to analyze the mediating effects of mentoring functions in college students and motivation levels in virtual, web-based, constructivist English classes. It is also intended to analyze the effects of web-based interactions on constructivist learning. For this, a survey was conducted on 210 college students all of who participated in a ‘Media English’ class. Correlation analysis, simple regression analysis, and hierarchical multiple regression analysis were conducted to verify three research hypotheses. This statistical analyses showed the results that 1) the mentoring function turned out to influence interactions in the virtual constructivism learning framework; 2) the mentoring function turned out to influence learning motivation in the virtual web-based constructivism learning framework; 3) mentoring function as an independent variable in the virtual web-based constructivism learning turned out to influence learning motivation as a dependent variable of college students through the media of interaction as a parameter. Therefore, the results indicated that the mentoring function influenced learning motivation levels of college students through interaction in the virtual web-based constructivist English learning framework.
The purpose of this research is to examine the significance of peer-peer interactions on L1 discussions for L2 reading tasks. This research was designed to see how college EFL students interact during a L1 group discussion assigned as part of an L2 reading task by a means of CA (conversation analysis). Five college EFL students engaged in an L1 group discussion on L2 reading comprehension questions and their conversations were video-recorded for transcription. The peer-peer interaction CA analyzed discussions through a turn-taking system and contextualization cues and has provided pedagogical implications. Observed interactions among students showed that a team leader playing a role as a mediator attempted to focus on the issues arising during the discussion to solve and foster the engagement from other team members. The findings of this study suggest that students effectively find the best ways of reaching desirable conclusions through negotiation-driven interactions. Group discussions with L1 can encourage students to use their linguistic resources to perform the L2 task effectively, which leads to successful completion of the given tasks.
With the wide availability of mobile devices, efforts to accommodate these technological devices have been made in pronunciation training. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of mobile apps in improving the perception and production of the English vowels, /o/ and /ɔ/, which are difficult to discriminate and produce for Korean learners of English. The participants were 24 college freshmen enrolled in a general English course. They shadowed the model pronunciation from the application and corrected their production after instant feedback from the automatic speech recognition application. Their perception was evaluated in the preand post-tests, and the production was visually examined on the formant chart. The training was held for 5 minutes each day, for a month. The results showed that the training made positive effects on improving students’ perception of the target vowels. There was also some progress in their production although the improvement was not as noticeable as in perception. A discrepancy in the production was discovered between male and female participants with the latter performing better.
The purpose of the study is two-fold: (a) to investigate L2 learners’ receptive and productive collocational knowledge concerning the learners’ lexical proficiency levels, and (b) to explore the degree of their productive collocational knowledge. A total of 358 Korean university students participated in this study and completed a Vocabulary Size Test, two receptive collocation tests, and one productive collocation test. The results revealed that there was significance among the scores of three collocation tests. It is also observed that receptive and productive collocational competence tends to increase as L2 learners’ vocabulary size develops. Regarding productive collocational knowledge gains, significant differences were found among collocation combinations but no interaction effect was found between combination types and vocabulary levels. The findings indicated that L2 learners need to be aware of the importance of learning collocational knowledge while teachers need to attempt to help them notice high-frequency collocations that regularly occur in various contexts.
The English language textbook for classes XI-XII, currently in use nationwide in Bangladesh, has drawn numerous reactions from multiple corners of the country. Bangladeshi teachers, major stakeholders, have been noticeably concerned about the effectiveness of the design of the textbook based on their teaching experiences (Hani & Siddika, 2018). It is important to know their perceptions of the textbook, since their perceptions have a significant influence on students’ learning English through the textbook. The current study, therefore, seeks to provide information about the participant teachers and their teaching contexts in order to judge the value of the textbook design in terms of contents selection and organization. For that research purpose, interviews were conducted with 10 teachers who were, at the time of research, teaching the textbook at different colleges in a district of the country. Based on the data, the study discusses the teachers’ first-hand experience with the textbook, providing a revealing insight into how well it facilitates students’ learning in the classroom. Finally, implications are suggested that are expected to guide the design of the next applicable version of the textbook.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of English learning through social media on the perception and affective factors of college students. To this end, researchers examined whether the educational use of YouTube and KakaoTalk, popular among college students in Korea, differs according to English improvement, affective factors, and English level. The subjects of this study were 63 freshmen majoring in Medical Convergence, who were taking college English at C University located in Gangwon-do. An online questionnaire was used for data collection. The collected data were analyzed using Jamovi, a statistical program. The results are as follows. First, the participants positively changed the perception that the use of social media had on the overall improvement of English. Second, the affective domains such as self-confidence, attitudes, values, beliefs, and interests of the participants also changed positively. Finally, it was confirmed that social media has educational value regardless of English level.
This study aims to investigate how multicultural aspects are dealt with in current elementary English textbooks. The cover pages, dialogues, main readings, and culture sections of a total of 10 elementary English textbooks for 5th and 6th graders were closely examined in terms of (1) the races and genders of the characters, (2) the cultural backgrounds of the contents, and (3) Bennett’s (2010) core values of multicultural education. The results revealed that each gender was equally represented and the textbooks present diverse cultural backgrounds in a balanced way. It was found, however, that there was an imbalance in terms of racial backgrounds. With respect to the core values of multicultural education, acceptance and appreciation of cultural diversity, and respect for human dignity and universal human rights were the top two values that appeared most frequently throughout the textbooks. Responsibility to a world community was the value that was comparatively hard to find in them. Detailed findings are discussed in greater depth, along with implications for elementary English education in Korea.