The purpose of this study is to determine whether the use of artificial intelligence (AI) improves English listening and reading proficiency. It focuses on whether its impacts differ by gender and major. The study was conducted in 2020 with 340 freshmen students in Korea. There were 182 male and 208 female students. The participants majored in different areas: 139 students majoring in aeronautics, 130 students studying policing and safety, 121 students studying in the arts department. The TOEIC test was adopted as pre- and post-tests to explore the impacts of using AI on English learning. To analyze the data, two-way ANOVAs were administered. The study found no interaction effects of gender or major on either listening and reading proficiency. However, gender and major, respectively, had significant impacts on listening. Regarding reading proficiency, major alone affected the students’ performance. Based on these findings, pedagogical implications are considered.
This paper explores a college EFL course designed to practice reading for pleasure during the pandemic. Sixty EFL college learners in a required English course read Mark Haddon’s (2004) [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time] within the structure of a regular reading and writing focused academic English course. Reading for pleasure is often considered unfit for inclusion in regular curriculum. Nevertheless, for digital natives, the act of pleasurable reading especially in L2, should be actively implemented into classroom activities. This study follows a case study which practices reading for pleasure by utilizing weekly quizzes, discussion questions and response paper. Students’ feedback was collected and analyzed in order to share students’ experiences in completing the tasks. The feedback shows how weekly quizzes and class discussions have encouraged them to continue reading the text, influenced their attitude on reading English books and how they were able to empathize with the characters. This paper invokes the need to include reading young adult literature into general English courses for college learners to make them lifelong readers of L2.
The present study examined the receptive and productive knowledge of collocations of second language (L2) and heritage speakers of Korean and also investigated the influence of phrasal frequency, exposure to Korean, and phonological short-term memory (PSTM). Seventeen L2 learners and 14 heritage speakers of Korean were tested on 30 Korean noun-verb collocations, which varied in phrasal frequency, using an acceptability judgment task and a collocation completion test. The results showed that both L2 and heritage speakers demonstrated considerable receptive knowledge of Korean collocations while productive knowledge was more limited for both groups. The mixed-effects modelling results of four independent variables of interest (i.e., phrasal frequency, exposure via media, academic use, and PSTM) showed that phrasal frequency was the only significant predictor of receptive knowledge of collocations for both L2 and heritage speakers; none of the four factors had a significant impact on productive knowledge of collocations for either group. These data are discussed in relation to previous studies on collocation development of L2 learners and heritage speakers.
The purpose of this study is to analyze interactions between learners and the instructor (ILI) and interactions among the learners (IAL) themselves in a single university reading class with a focus on scaffolding. Thirty-three learners majoring in computer engineering and public administration participated in the class. Twenty-six out of 33 learners took a non-face-to-face online class (NFTFOC) for a 15-week semester, and the remaining seven learners chose to take a face-to-face class (FTFC) for the five weeks after the mid-term exam. Data from both the NFTFOC and FTFC were collected for 15 weeks from September to December 2021 including an automatic video recording system, quizzes, assignments, etc. through chatting boxes, bulletin boards, and emails. The obtained data were analyzed into both qualitative descriptions and quantitative statistical measures. The results showed that interactions in the low and mid-level of higher-order thinking from both the linguistic and cognitive perspectives occurred similarly, and both amplifying and simplifying of scaffolding functions in NFTFOC were more frequently observed than those in FTFC. In addition, both NFTFOC and FTFC got better scores on the post-test. As development occurs in language learning, a longitudinal and in-depth analysis of the language learning processes is required in future studies.
The present study analyzed small group interaction in the videoconferencing-mediated English class at a university in South Korea. Adopting the ‘affordance’ construct (van Lier, 2004) as a conceptual framework for interpreting small group work, the goals of the research are to 1) identify the types of linguistic affordances emerging in videoconferencing-mediated small group work and 2) examine learners’ perceptions and responses to the linguistic affordances. Data were collected from two major sources: 40 video recording files of small group observation and post-class interviews with four students. The paper analyzed 13 extracts selected from the transcription of the video recordings. The overall results of the research suggest that a range of linguistic affordances emerged through interaction and participants responded to the affordances they perceived in various ways. Three types of linguistic affordances were observed in the data: technology-generated affordances, learner-generated affordances, and learner-to-learner-generated affordances. The study findings have important implications for providing new insights into the operationalization of the affordance construct as well as advancing the understanding of the affordance perspective of L2 learning.
This study was conducted to analyze geminate consonant errors(안에 [an.ɛ] → *안네[an.nɛ]) produced by Chinese learners during their acquisition of Korean linking sounds within the framework of Optimality Theory. The study was further intended to find possible constraints and causes applicable to the error. This paper argues that this error results from the interplay of the Align-R constraint, where the boundaries of a morpheme and syllable are aligned in the learner’s mother tongue, and the onset constraint, which is required for CV, a universal linguistic syllable. This study identifies the cause of the geminate consonant errors among Chinese leaners as the consequence of the simultaneous influences of interference from the learners’ native language and of linking sounds, which occur universally in linguistics.