This paper presents a study on motivating and demotivating factors in learning Korean. The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors affecting the learning motivation and demotivation of university students in Singapore taking Korean as unrestricted elective, and investigate what differences exist in the motivating and demotivating factors based on their Korean levels. Through the analysis of surveys on university students in Singapore, it was found that their major motivating factors were the travel orientation and the cultural interest. These motivating factors did not show any difference depending on the Korean levels. The major demotivating factors of Korean learners were the evaluation factor and the language factor. By interpreting open-ended responses, the competition factor was found as a demotivating factor. In addition, the competition factor and the language factor showed differences between the first level and the second level and above. This study suggests to motivate Korean learners by applying the major motivating factors to a class and weakening the major demotivating factors.

This study aimed to analyze the status of major countries’ online national language dissemination for overseas learners. This was done by the representative national organizations founded with governmental support. The study comparatively analyzed the dissemination status of the representative organizations of other countries and representative Korean organizations for Korean language education. The results of the comparative analysis of the major websites of the seven countries investigated in this study revealed the following characteristics. First, the websites were categorized into integrated single and divided dual websites according to their characteristics. Second, the language and cultural content varied depending on whether the websites provided information on offline education service or not. Third, there was a major difference in the number of service languages available on each website. Further, it was distinguished by its strength in providing a variety of specialized learning materials including self-learning modules, video clips, webtoons (internet-based comics), and study materials. However, it was also revealed that further improvements were required in promoting offline education programs and introducing the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK). This study is valuable because the analysis results suggest implications for improvements to be made to the website of the Korean language for better dissemination.

This study, drawing on critical discourse analysis methodologies, aims to show how Chinese international students are discursively represented in a Korean newspaper. Articles from the Chosun Ilbo were collected between 2008-2016. The media has framed social images on Chinese International students quite often from the Beijing Olympic torch relay in 2008. Following van Dijk’s (1998) ideological theory, macro- and micro-level of textual analysis were conducted. It was found that the two groups of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Chinese international students) were dichotomized. It was enforced by discursive strategies such as conjugation, over-lexicalization, and delegitimization. As for the micro-level analysis, drawing on Halliday’s (1985) systemic functional grammar, three dimensions of analysis (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) were conducted to uncover the power relations under the linguistic forms. This study concludes that Chinese international students were represented by the ideological square of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation.

Today, tens of millions of ethnic Chinese are scattered throughout Southeast Asia as a result of the massive influx of immigrants from China during the past several centuries. The present study analyzed the language attitude of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, focusing on four countries: Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. For this purpose, a total of 177 samples of language attitude questionnaire were collated. The questionnaire was composed of 11 language attitude-related elements in affective, behavioral, and cognitive components with respect to the multiple languages used in the countries: national language, English, local Chinese dialects, Mandarin, and others. Analysis of the data reveals intriguing findings about the language attitude of the ethnic Chinese in different countries. Both the similarities and the differences of language attitude are found among the ethnic Chinese groups in the Southeast Asian countries, reflecting the political, economic, and social situations of each country. The prospect of the local Chinese dialects look dim due to exogenous factors surrounding the linguistic ecosystems in the region.

In dieser Arbeit wurde versucht, die Perzeption der Studenten von dem Kulturlernen im Fremdsprachenunterricht(FU) zu erfassen und über Ausrichtung des Unterrichts für Kulturlernen inklusive Literacies zu diskutieren. Dabei ging ich davon aus, dass der Kulturunterricht an den koreanischen Hochschulen sogennate Multiliteracies einschließen sollen. Dazu habe ich Studenten befragt, um ihre Perzeption von Literacices beim Kulturunterricht zu erfassen. Davor habe ich ein paar Terminologie wie Literacies, Cultural Literacy, Intercultural Literacy, Critical Literacy, und Information Literacy neu definert. Nach der Analyse der Umfragenresultat habe ich die Aufsätze von den Unterrichtsführungen des Intercultural Literacy und Critical Literacy untersucht. Die Analyse hat es gezeigt, dass die meisten koreanischen Studenten Kulturelernen im FU als wichtig fanden. Dagegen glaubten die ähnlichen Zahl der Studenten, dass Critical Literacy im Kulturlernen weniger nötig als andere Literacies war. Das hängt von dem Schulsystem von Korea, weil Lernerinnen in der Schule Kritik nicht so einfach üben könnten. Daher soll man im Kulturlernen an den Hochschulen Critical Literacy behandeln. Außerdem soll man beim Kulturlernen Schwerpunkt an das Interculral Literacy legen, um Studentinnen bei der Vorbereitung auf die globale Welt zu helfen. Die Arbeit hat auf der Grundlage der vorherigen Untersuchungen darüber diskutiert, wie man Intercultural Litarcy und Critical Literacy ins Kulturlernen einführen kann.

The present study examines the features of communicative functions in middle school English textbooks, identifying whether or not they are presented based on the spiral structure. It also compares the communicative functions of 15 different middle school English textbooks and investigates whether the National English Listening Tests (NELTs) reflect the communicative functions presented in the textbooks. Two corpora were compiled using the 15 middle school English textbooks and the NELTs, and they were analyzed using WordSmith Tools. The results show that all the textbooks included communicative functions that the National Curriculum recommends; however, the textbooks presented a limited number of functions. Nonetheless, the communicative functions were presented relatively in a spiral way. The majority number of communicative functions in the textbooks and the NELTs were similar to each other, but there were some functions in the tests that were not covered in the textbooks. These results imply that more diverse communicative functions should be included in textbooks in order to help improve students’ communicative competence. The communicative functions not presented in the textbooks should not be included in the NELTs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean college students’ syntactic development, especially the order of acquisition in terms of the types of the sentences and clauses written in English essays. Eighty-six Korean female college students in Seoul participated in this study. For research method, the students wrote English essays with the given topic through the test web site. The essays were scored on a scale of one to six., and then were divided into three proficiency groups. After that, the students’ essays were analyzed and counted by types of sentences/clauses and frequency: simple/compound/complex sentences and nominal/adverbial/adjective clauses. The findings revealed significant differences in the frequency of different types of clauses by students’ English levels. The results showed that the amount of sentences/clauses based on the level of English proficiency was quite different. In particular, significant differences were found in the use of the complex sentences and subordinate clauses by levels. In addition, the use of adjective (relative) clauses was prominent only in the advanced level. Teaching implications were discussed and future research suggestions were made at the end of the paper.

The present study compared the effects of isolated and integrated form-focused instruction (FFI) on the learning of vocabulary in reading passages. Their effects were also compared to those of incidental exposure on vocabulary learning. It further investigated whether such effects would differ depending on the types of vocabulary assessments. To this end, 80 college students in reading-oriented classes received either isolated or integrated FFI treatments over four 50-minute sessions. They also took the pretest and posttest designed to measure their vocabulary learning. The vocabulary tests consisted of two assessment types: one without contexts and the other provided with contexts. The results showed that the learners remembered the words instructed through isolated or integrated FFI better than those through incidental exposure while reading. However, no significant differences were observed between the two different types of FFI in learning target vocabulary. Some advantages were found for isolated FFI on the vocabulary test provided without contexts and for integrated FFI on the vocabulary test provided with context. Directions for further studies and pedagogical implications will be discussed.

This study investigates the core competencies required of Korean secondary-school English teachers and how they perceive these competencies in terms of importance, applicability, and teachers’ competency level ahead of implementing the 2015 revised national English curriculum in secondary schools. After the literature research, interviews, and expert review processes, five core competencies were extracted: curriculum and content reorganization competency; learner-centered teaching competency; innovative assessment competency; multicultural (intercultural) education competency; and information literacy and ICT use. From the results of a survey administered to 93 secondary school English teachers, it was found that the perceived competency level was lower than required, but it was higher than applicability. Overall, teachers felt insecure about how to apply the required competencies to their lessons. There was also a difference between middle school teachers and high school teachers in the self-rating results. These results provide implications for teacher preparation and the direction of teacher education toward the successful implementation of the 2015 revised curriculum.

The current study investigated the usage of the bilingual Vocabulary Size Test (VST) within Korean EFL environment. Thirty-two university students with an intermediate to high proficiency participated in this study. The students were given a Korean bilingual version of VST and reported their official English scores. The findings of this study are as following: (1) The VST scores showed a significant relationship with students’ proficiency scores which indicates that students with a bigger size of vocabulary had a higher proficiency of English. (2) When VST scores were divided into each frequency level, no particular frequency band demonstrated a significant relationship with English proficiency. Also, the difficulty of each level did not show a consistent pattern. Based on the results of VST, the influence of Korean EFL environment such as loanwords and the test-oriented education system was discovered. This study provides implications for teaching vocabulary in EFL environment and suggests the need for developing of a vocabulary size test for Korean context.

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.

This study aims to present some strategies for teaching the students Arabic idioms. Arabic idioms can be defined as expressions whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements, as kick the bucket or hang one’s head, or from the general grammatical rules of a language, as the table round for the round table, and that is not a constituent of a larger expression. In linguistics, idioms are usually presumed to be figures of speech, contradicting the principle of compositionality. That compositionality is the key notion for the analysis of idioms is emphasized in most accounts of idioms. This principle states that the meaning of a whole should be constructed from the meanings of the parts that make up the whole. In other words, one should be in a position to understand the whole if one understands the meanings of each of the parts that make up the whole. The strategies presented in this paper are based on the definitions or the linguistic peculiarities of idiom, mainly from the syntactic and semantic points of view. It’s worth mentioning that recently Arab linguists are showing unprecedented interests in idiomatic expressions and compiling the dictionary of Arabic idioms.

This paper discusses the grammatical categories of tense-aspect expressions at a discourse level and how discourse dimensions should be connected with discourse functions. Among many tense-aspect expressions, the paper focuses on the forms ‘-ess-’ and ‘-essess-’, which are complex in a sense that they depict both tense and aspect. The results show that ‘-ess-’ has a total of five discourse functions: ‘statement of past situation,’ ‘reminiscence of past situation,’ ‘objectification of present situation,’ ‘present validation of default result’ and ‘realization of hypothetical result.’ Moreover, ‘-essess-’ represents ‘order of past situations’ and ‘present invalidation of default results.’ Also these discourse functions are related to the discourse elements of ‘topic, information, and speaker.’ The findings of this study explain the characteristics of the discourse function relevant to discourse elements. Ultimately, discourse research on tense-aspect expressions in Korean language education enables understanding of the utterance intention of Korean speakers using tense-aspect grammar. And it provides learners with the basis of using Korean correctly and appropriately.

‘hǎohāor+de’ is composed of the syntactic superimposed form ‘hǎohāor’ and the structural auxiliary word ‘de.’ It is a structure that occurs very frequently in modern spoken Chinese. ‘hǎohāor’ can only act as an adverbial (have a good time) or an attribute (a quite good book in a sentence). ‘hǎohāor’ cannot be used alone, or act as a subject, an object or a predicate. Nor can it modify a noun or a noun phrase directly. However, ‘hǎohāor+de’ can be used alone, and can be used as a predicate, a complement, an attribute and an adverbial. Different syntactic functions of ‘hǎohāor+de’ have different semantic features. This is a difficult point for the students who are non-native speakers of Chinese. This paper discusses in detail the syntactic functions and the related semantic features of ‘hǎohāor+de,’ and also tries to probe into the source of it, hoping to provide some help for Chinese language teaching.

‘Manhta/manhi’ and ‘duo’ are common expressions that can be used to express large quantity in Korean and Chinese, respectively. By conducting a comparative study on ‘manhta/manhi’ in Korean and ‘duo’ in Chinese, this article comes to a conclusion on different conditions where there are correspondence and non-correspondence concerning the constructions that include ‘manhta/manhi’ and ‘duo’. The constructions that include ‘manhta/manhi,’ ‘duo’ and verbs are (1) ‘manhi+transitive verbs’, ‘transitive verbs+duo’ and ‘duo+transitive verbs’; (2) ‘manhi+intransitive verbs’, ‘intransitive verbs+duo’ and ‘manhi+intransitive verbs’. The constructions that include ‘manhta’, ‘duo’ and nouns are (1) ‘nouns+manhta’ and ‘nouns+duo’; (2) ‘manhun+nouns’ and ‘duo+nouns’. By scrutinizing the constructions that include ‘duo’, ‘manhta’ and numeral and quantifier, and adjectives or adverbs according to their syntactic orders, the correspondence and non-correspondence between these constructions are summarized. In conclusion, this paper attempts to contribute to teaching and learning Korean for Chinese students, as well as teaching and learning Chinese for Koreans.

Dans cette étude, les commentaires des professeurs sur la capacité de communication et la capacité de traduction ont été conçus et formulés en utilisant une activité paraphrasante basée sur la théorie interprétative de la traduction dans une classe de traduction au niveau universitaire. La réaction des élèves lors du cours de traduction a ensuite été analysée . Le but de cette étude était d'étudier la valeur éducative de ce type de commentaires des professeurs et de trouver la méthode la plus efficace de rétroaction des professeurs appropriée pour les étudiants qui apprennent la traduction du français vers le coréen. Les principaux résultats des analyses de commentaires des professeurs sont résumés comme suit: (1) Certaines des tâches qui semblaient difficiles pour les élèves ont été classées en éléments de capacité de traduction et de capacité de communication. Les commentaires du professeur, organisés en capacité de traduction et de communication par la méthode d'enseignement par la paraphrase en fonction des difficultés rencontrées par les élèves dans leurs tâches, ont généralement une influence positive sur la capacité de traduction des étudiants, et en particulier la capacité linguistique des élèves. (2) Comme une méthode répétitive d'apprentissage des synonymes, les commentaires répétés des professeurs par la paraphrase ont été trouvés pour aider à améliorer la capacité linguistique des élèves. (3) Il était également possible de voir le potentiel de la compréhension par les élèves des stratégies d'apprentissage autonomes basées sur la méta-cognition en termes de lecture, de traduction et d’écriture.

Morphological competence plays an important role in extending one’s vocabulary in grammatical context. This study is to explore the developmental distribution of English grammatical morphemes appearing in elementary English textbooks. To this end, the study developed grammatical morpheme recognition and elicitation tests based on the bilingual syntax measurement (BSM). The tests are given to 114 fifth graders and 126 sixth graders across small, medium and metropolitan cities. The students were stratified into high, mid and low English ability groups by their English achievement scores. The result shows that English grammatical morpheme awareness was positively correlated with students’ English ability. The grammatical morphological development of Korean students was more in alignment with that of English learners as a foreign language than that of native speakers. Pedagogical implications are provided at the end of the paper.

This case study investigated the changes of four Korean English major college students’ motivation and interest in TOEIC studying based on qualitative research method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted once a month for six months. Interest is a unique motivational variable with affective and cognitive domains together including interactions between persons and their objects wheres motivation is more broad, psychological and overlapping concept compared with interest. The results showed that the participants expressed the strong instrumental and extrinsic motivation for TOEIC studying while they confessed the intrinsic motivation for English learning. However, some participants had both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation on TOEIC studying as time went by. The participants’ strong perceptions on TOEIC in Korea were strongly related with situational interest in TOEIC or TOEIC studying. The participants’ interest in TOEIC studying was triggered as they improved the TOEIC score. However, one participant showed the expiration of interest in TOEIC studying right after achieving a high TOEIC score, but his interest in potential English studying was triggered.

As a preliminary study for the effective development of a genre-focused English learner corpus, this article aims to investigate most frequent error types and their frequencies in English emails written by undergraduate freshmen in South Korea. Data for this study include English emails of 86 Korean students majoring in humanities or social science in a university located in Daegu. With the rise of Internet, ESL/EFL education has witnessed a growing interest in teaching email usage in composition courses, as it provides a variety of opportunities to evaluate language abilities including interpersonal and pragmatic abilities. The present article revealed that the most frequent error type was concerned with style, such as capitalization (28.7%) and punctuation (7.8%), which was followed by determiner deletion (6.3%), genre convention such as closing (3%), countability of nouns (3%), and verb choice (2.7%). Different error types and frequencies were identified according to different English proficiency levels (Korean SAT and TOEIC), which evidenced the need to include the English proficiency level annotation in the corpus design and to focus on different types of errors in class in accordance with learners’ proficiency levels.

This study aims to investigate the interaction patterns between the teacher and students or among students themselves in a Korean elementary English classroom by analysing classroom talk and by focusing on the types of the teacher’s questions and feedback as well as the use of L1 and L2. This analysis is used to determine the influence of such interaction on the students’ communicative skills in English. A female teacher in Gyeonggi province and a 6th-grade class participated in the data collection. This study included data from video or audio recordings, interviews, field notes, self-assessments, and portfolios. The transcribed data were analysed using Tsui’s (1994) framework and Verplaetse’s (1995, 2000) coding system. The results of this analysis indicated that the interaction patterns varied between participants into three groups: teacher-initiated talk (e.g., T-S talk) vs students-initiated talk (e.g., S-T talk & S-S talk). At the beginning stage of lesson, the teacher-initiated talk made up the majority of talk in English, and facilitated the students’ involvement in classroom learning including their language use. In the S-S talk, the students were involved in interaction which occurred naturally without the teacher’s control.