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.

The study discussed advanced-level Korean high school EFL learners’ demotivation and remotivation strategies in English learning. Demotivation refers to specific external forces that reduce or harm motivation; remotivation is the process of recovering the reduced motivation. Although both are common in L2 learning, only a few studies address this issue. Using the survey data of 130 participants, the study identified eight demotivating factors through factor analysis. The first factor, negative attitude toward English, indicates that even high school students felt demotivated because of the sheer difficulty of studying English. Descriptive statistics revealed that a negative attitude toward the English-speaking community was not a strong demotivator, which indicated that students possessed Machiavellian motivation. Correlation and regression analysis suggested that no demotivator had a significant negative relationship with English scores; rather, the ways students perceived the demotivators were more important. Eight remotivation strategies were identified; among those, “Keep thinking about the social importance of English” was the most often mentioned one. These results suggested the need for further qualitative, systemic research on remotivators and for training programs for practicing remotivation strategies.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of a two-week English-language orientation program at a Korean university on first-year students’ perceptions of English. This quantitative study contributes to the local literature by documenting the changes on a preand post-course survey that measured participants’ willingness to communicate, foreign language anxiety, attitudes towards English, and perceptions of English as a global language. Key results of independent-samples t-tests indicated that student perceptions showed statistically significant changes on five of the six scales, and that the biggest influences of the program were on willingness to communicate and lessening student anxiety. The study also investigated the link between program satisfaction and experience of studying English abroad, finding that there was no relation between them. However, a one-way ANOVA and correlation analysis indicated that there was a relationship between program satisfaction and students’ self-rated proficiency, finding that the lower-proficiency students were slightly less satisfied than those rating themselves as “average” or “good” English speakers. The study concludes with recommendations for future studies and for planning English-language orientation programs in Korean universities.

This study investigated the production patterns of vowel epenthesis/deletion in Korean learners’ English contrasts of /ʧ/ vs. /ʧi/ and /ʤ/ vs. /ʤi/ in word-final position, where such errors are frequently observed among the learners. Through a production experiment of 20 pairs of English words contrastive in word-final vowel, a total of 800 tokens were obtained from 20 Korean learners of English of high and low proficiency levels. The results revealed that the learners exhibited phonological processes of vowel epenthesis or deletion and that multiple factors such as voicing of a preceding consonant, frequencies of target words and learners’ proficiency in target language were involved. Voicing of a final palato-alveolar affricate played an important role in vowel epenthesis. With regard to vowel deletion, learners with low proficiency levels showed the influence of voicing of a palato-alveolar affricate by deleting the vowel /i/ more frequently after the voiceless /ʧ/ than after the voiced /ʤ/. Overall, the vowel epenthesis error seems to be motivated by L1 phonology while vowel deletion error was influenced by word frequencies. Further acoustic analysis revealed that higher-level learners’ epenthetic vowels, when compared to lexical vowels, exhibited significant differences with regard to vowel ratio and F1 while the low-level learners’ did not.

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit Konzepten und Ansätzen der Landeskunde, die sich in Bezug auf die jeweilige soziale Situation und den Lernerbedarf historisch entwickelt haben. Im Fachbereich Germanistik herrscht seit 20 Jahren die Krise der Geisteswissenschaft. Statt Literaturveranstaltungen, die von Studenten abgewählt werden, wurde Landeskunde als ein neues Veranstaltungsangebot in den Vordergrund gestellt, damit die Germanistik wieder einen Aufschwung erleben kann. Aber in Korea wurden die Begriffe, Konzepte und Inhalte der Landeskundeveranstaltungen noch nicht festgelegt, z.B. ist unklar, was man unterrichten soll und auch wie man unterrichten soll. Aus diesen Gründen wurde in der vorliegenden Arbeit versucht darzustellen, wie Landeskunde im Fachbereich Deutsch als Fremdsprache in Deutschland diskutiert wird. Zuerst wurde die historische Entwicklung der Landeskundeansätze vorgestellt, wobei das Konzept und der Inhalt bzw. die Schwerpunkte diskutiert werden, was mit den Zielen und dem Lernerbedarf des Fremdsprachenunterrichts zusammenhängt. Darüber hinaus wurde am Ende der Arbeit ein didaktisches Konzept kurz vorgestellt. In Korea werden im Rahmen der Universität die zahlreichen Landeskundeveranstaltungen meistens von Literaturwissenschaftlern angeboten, sodass der Themenbereich Literatur als Kultur zu sehr hervorgehoben wird, was dem Bedarf der Lerner und der Gesellschaft überhaupt nicht entspricht. Kommunikative und interkulturelle Landeskunde beschäftigt sich mit der Situation und Themen bzw. Inhalten, die unsere Lerner motivieren, weil solche mit ihnen selbst und ihren Interessen sehr eng verbunden ist.

Heinrich Manns Professor Unrat weist charakteristische Merkmale des ‚Gesellschaftsromans’ auf: Repräsentativ zu erwähnen ist die Darstellung der Schule als ein Modell der Gesellschaft. Heinrich Mann zielte mit seinem schulsatirischen Professor Unrat darauf ab, die kaiserliche Bildungsanstalt zu kritisieren, und weitergehend psychologisierende Kritik an der zeitgenössischen bürgerlichen Kultur und Gesellschaft auszuüben. Zu diesem Zweck gestaltet der Autor die Schule und die darin agierende Figuren als eine Art Modell, das in einer vertretenden Funktion für die Gesellschaft steht. Dieses Gesellschaftsmodell führt eine Reflexion über den Bankrott der humanistischen Bildungsvorstellungen in der Wilhelminischen Zeit und ebenso über die Doppelmoral des Bürgertums in der Übergangssituation zur Moderne herbei. Hinsichtlich dieses Gesellschaftsmodells ist zu betrachten, inwiefern das Verfallen der neuhumanistischen Bildungsidee und das Verkommen bürgerlicher Kultur im Roman unterbreitet werden. Vor diesem Hintergrund kann der Protagonist des Romans Professor Unrat als Repräsentant des Bildungsbürgertums dieser Übergangszeit verstanden werden, in der die neuhumanistische Einheit der Bildungstradition verfällt.

The knowledge, that the human brain has the faculty of multilingualism, is no result recently revealed by the picture giving processes of the modern brain research. It is simply a matter of fact, shown through everday life. (Nevertheless impressing is indeed the visualizing of the three-dimensional network systems which embed languages in the brain.) Also the knowledge, that languages are learned (and also forgotten) in early childhood age most easily, is not at all a new research result. So, if modern brain research may provide an original contribution in promotion of multilingualism or not, is not a so important question at this moment. The bottom line is the well-known fact, that promotion of language acquisition / learning should be realized in a motivating environment. This is an old pedagogical task. The modern brain research confirms the fact that the only one ideal language acquisition method does not exist. Since language acquisition / learning is realized on individually shaped different ways. To promote multilingualism in a person requires the knowledge of his / her individual language biography. This can be described by the so-called Laswell-formula. To shaper the focus onto the language learning group of grown-up persons, the best language learning method exists in conscious making. This method is not only related to the foreign language but also to the differences between foreign language and mother tongue and thereby to the special features of the mother tongue itself. However the degree of consciousness related to the mother tongue is usually very low. Translation with its two main methods, i.e. documentary and functional translation, is also a very use- and helpful language learning method in grown-up persons. Since it makes conscious of the differences in semantics and syntax of the related language pair. Especially functional translation as one type of intercultural communication further makes conscious of the differences in communication situations between source and target language.