The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of no planning and online planning on complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in L2 spoken and written tasks. The study was designed into 2x2 with two independent variables: planning conditions (no planning and online planning) and task modality (speaking and writing). First, 80 Korean EFL undergraduates performed two tasks in a laboratory setting: a proficiencyassigning narrative spoken task and a randomly assigned main task. The main task had four different conditions: no planning in speaking, online planning in speaking, no planning in writing, and online planning in writing. The participants’ spoken and written performances were measured and analyzed for syntactic complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The findings demonstrated that the no planning (NP) group improved accuracy and fluency significantly more than the online planning (OP) group in the spoken task and that the NP group improved their fluency more than the OP group in the written task. Additionally, in both planning conditions, the written task increased accuracy more than the spoken task, whereas the spoken task increased fluency more than the written task. It is hoped that these findings will facilitate understanding of the supportive role of planning in task manipulation in terms of L2 learners’ limited attentional resources and its relationship with linguistic performance.
This study aligns with the recent calls in L2 Willingness to Communicate (WTC) research that mark a shift from viewing WTC as a static, trait-like variable to a construct that is dynamic, fluid, and situational. To accomplish this aim, this study collected both interactional and interview data to examine the situational changes of an ESL learner’s WTC. The data was from two courses – one ESL course, and one academic graduate seminar – collected during the participant’s first semester at an American university. The findings show that the participant’s WTC fluctuates according to the course topic, interlocutors, group size, and the anxiety level of the L2 speaker. These findings imply that teachers in L2 classrooms need to take into consideration the various situational factors that promote or inhibit WTC. Other than these pedagogical implications, the study also offers a methodological framework for documenting situational WTC by means of combining interviews with conversation analysis of interactional data.
In order to inform foreign language education practices that can empower students to properly retrieve and utilize information in today’s society, research on the nature of reading that takes place on the Internet—referred to as online research and comprehension—is of paramount importance. As an initial step, this study investigated the strategies employed by six Korean tertiary-level learners of English that engaged in a second language online research and comprehension (L2 ORC) task. To this end, screen recordings of L2 ORC sessions and verbal data from stimulated recall interviews were triangulated in order to identify and categorize strategy use behind L2 ORC. The results revealed that a wide variety of strategies for constructing a coherent reading path as well as comprehending single and multiple digital texts contributed to successful L2 ORC. These findings demonstrate that the current conception of L2 reading needs to be expanded to encompass the novel challenges posed by the Internet.
As research evidence for the facilitative effects of reading strategies on reading comprehension has been accumulating, research and pedagogical interests in prereading strategies such as prediction and schema activation are increasing. Yet, little research evidence of how actual performance on such tasks may be related to reading comprehension is sparse. This study explores whether prediction abilities and content schema are related to Korean middle school EFL learners’ reading comprehension abilities in English, and whether such potential relations may differ for factual and inferential comprehension. The study participants were one hundred thirty-seven Korean seventh grade students, and their performance on schema activation, prediction, and reading comprehension abilities was investigated, while controlling for their overall language proficiency and literacy skills. The findings indicated that although both prediction abilities and content schema facilitated reading comprehension, prediction abilities were a relatively stronger predictor of both factual and inferential comprehension. The results further suggest the need to provide effective trainings on pre-reading strategies.
The purpose of this study was to critically examine the absolute grading system applied to the English section of South Korea’s College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), in a departure from a relative grading system, for the first time in 2017. English language instructors as well as English education researchers have somewhat differing understandings of the concept of absolute evaluation/grading. This paper investigated the nature of absolute evaluation/grading as presented in theses and academic papers as well as research reports, English language assessment textbooks, and press releases from the Ministry of Education (MOE). The study identified four different testing contexts in which the term absolute evaluation/grading is applied: criterion-referenced testing; grading based on fixed cut scores; measurement against external criteria; and norm-referenced testing. While retaining the same test structures as in the prior normreferenced testing situation, the CSAT English section corresponds to the second context, that is, interpreting results based on fixed cut scores. Achievement standards essential for producing criterion-referenced tests have so far been undefined, with cut scores being arbitrarily set. The examination concluded that the CSAT English section under an absolute grading scale is essentially a norm-referenced test that produces a significantly larger percentage of higher-level test-takers. There is a fair likelihood that, unlike MOE’s claim, converting to an absolute evaluation/grading system may not bring about the intended positive change.
This study investigates how newcomers to the university setting integrate lexical bundles (LBs)—frequently recurring word sequences—into their writing by analyzing the bundles’ syntactic roles (i.e., relations to larger structures). Previous studies have considered phrases and clauses as the main internal structures of LBs; however, these boundaries might not always be clear because such fragmented sequences do not stand alone, but are embedded in larger structures. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the syntactic roles of LBs identified in native and nonnative corpora of English argumentative essays (approximately 1400 essays, comprising half a million words each) written in response to identical writing prompts. The results show that the two language groups display generally similar patterns of using LBs due to their status as novice academic writers, but at the same time, their patterns do diverge to some extent, with some uses unique to or more common to each group. The extent to which different population groups use LBs in relation to the syntactic complexity typical of a given register could be indicative of their language development.