The present study has investigated teaching motivation and demotivation factors on itinerant English teachers for pre-school children. A total of 119 itinerant English teachers were asked to answer a questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale, which had 32 items for teaching motivation and 14 items for demotivation. They also responded to 8 items asking about personal background information, which were used to examine the direct influence on teachers’ (de)motivation. Factor analyses were conducted to explore (de)motivation factors. As a result, five factors emerged regarding teaching motivation: altruistic motivation, intrinsic motivation, interpersonal motivation, monetary reward, and self-improvement motivation. Four teaching demotivation factors were also identified through factor analysis: burnout, lack of self-confidence, insufficient external support, and lack of autonomy. The result of t-test and one-way ANOVA indicated that teachers’ age, marital status, and teaching experiences have influenced teaching motivation, whereas their undergraduate major and age contributed to the level of teaching demotivation. This study implies that it is necessary to provide them with systematic pre- and in-service teacher training programs in order to develop the comprehensive knowledge of early childhood education as well as to improve their overall English proficiency.

This study aimed to examine educational connoisseurships of the 3rd and 4th year pre-service elementary school teachers (PSTs). Twenty eight 3rd year and 28 4th year PSTs were asked to write a critique on a video-taped elementary English lesson. Their comments were categorized and examined to see if there were any outstanding characteristics. It was also investigated whether the different amounts of coursework the two groups of PSTs had completed were reflected in their critiques. Many PSTs were found not to have developed their educational connoisseurships to examine whether a lesson was designed to maximize learning, and the functions of the target expressions were practiced and learned in a meaningful way. Two most common perspectives in their critiques were to examine whether the students were interested in the learning activities, and whether the learning activities helped students learn the target expressions. Some differences in the views on classroom English and differential learning activities were found across the two groups.

With the advent of technology, telecollaborative projects have emerged that enable learners to interact with native speakers of the target language, helping them to improve both language proficiency and intercultural communicative competence (ICC). One long-lasting project is Cultura, which has been successful because of its pedagogical qualities, such as a task-based approach and collaborative learning (Furstenberg & Levet, 2014). In this study, a Cultura-inspired project was designed to foster interaction between students of Korean as a foreign language (KFL) residing in Australia and students of English as a foreign language (EFL) residing in Korea. ‘Facebook’ was used for asynchronous communication, and ‘Kakao Talk’ and ‘Facebook’ messenger were used for synchronous online chat. In order to suggest a model for designing and practicing future intercultural projects, this study focused on demonstrating the procedures for each task and examining evidence of ICC in the students’ interactions, as represented in speech acts. This study also investigated the students’ experience of the project, using surveys and interviews. The findings suggest that the students showed limited knowledge of their target culture in a word-association task on Facebook, but that their online interactions provided evidence of ICC, for example curiosity, and reflection on their own culture. Most of the students enjoyed the project, especially the online chat. However, the participants mentioned issues, such as the limited number of online interactions and lack of in-class discussions. For future practice, the use of various modes of communication and the desirability of balancing proficiency levels in the target language are discussed.

Ellipsis has been analyzed, if at all, as a type of cohesion markers by earlier studies. The underestimation of its importance and the lack of attention it has received has resulted in only few empirical studies analyzing the ellipsis as a primary object of inquiry. At the same time, there are conflicting findings on whether the relationship between ellipsis use and discourse quality is substantially positive or insignificant. Aware of these gaps, this study focuses on ellipsis and its subtypes to examine whether ellipses enhance the quality of writing. The study participants were 315 Korean high school students who wrote stories in English. Their writing samples were analyzed for ellipsis use and writing quality. The findings revealed that ellipsis occurrences in writing had a substantial relationship with the overall writing quality. This result was substantiated by a separate examination of the good vs. poor writer groups: Good writers used a significantly greater number of ellipses than did poor writers. Structural and nominal ellipses were the most prominent types of ellipses while clausal and verbal ellipsis occurred rarely. This pattern was held true for both good and poor writer groups. The current study promotes the status of ellipsis as a definitely contributing factor to good writing.

The contributions of teachers in building foundation of social processes, promoting learners’ agency and engagements have been constantly highlighted. This study explores language socialization of English Language Learners (ELLs) in an elementary school in U.S., focusing on the role of an ESL teacher. It examines how the ESL teacher provides linguistic and cultural scaffolding, and creates a learning environment conducive to ELLs’ socialization into American school academic discourse (Gee, 1999). A prevalent approach for linguistic scaffolding was through using questions. Questions were used for assessment, identifying prior knowledge, current understanding level, and potential level for future development, and to train ELLs to think critically and analytically. Cultural scaffolding was made through classroom scripts, such as whole group and small group activities, individual work with teacher assistance, and working locations in the classrooms. The classroom script projected American values of power functioning, respect for individuals, and freedom of choice. The findings imply that ESL learners need more than linguistic scaffolding and having the knowledge of cultural learning dynamics could be crucial in multicultural students’ socialization into the mainstream American school discourse.

The purpose of the current study is to present a class model of SQ3R instruction, which consists of 5 stages of reading strategy, Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review for foreign language learning and to investigate its effects on learners’ self-efficacy and their reading comprehension. Five reading steps of reading strategy were instructed associated with skill practices, annotating, note-taking and summary outlining. A total of 23 students in a college academic reading class participated in the study. Students’ self-selected academic reading materials were used for the course. Reading self-efficacy survey and the academic reading part of IELTS practice test were conducted before and after the instruction. Student products such as annotated texts and reaction writing as well as portfolios were collected and analyzed. The survey and academic reading test results indicated that the learners’ reading self-efficacy and their reading ability were improved and that the students seemed to have gained more confidence in academic reading.

This study investigated peer-to-peer interaction during collaborative, computer-mediated reading tasks. Fourteen university EFL students in Korea worked in pairs to complete three gapfill tasks. The transcript data from these tasks were analyzed to determine: (1) how often collaboration occurs during collaborative reading tasks, (2) the ways in which peers help each other, and (3) how successful peers are in resolving the problems they collaboratively pursue. The results showed that each of these aspects of interaction varied among sets of pairs. On average, however, the participants collaborated to jointly solve 75% of the problems they encountered. They also used a range of helping behaviors during collaboration. While the participants correctly resolved nearly half of the problems they attempted, half were incorrectly answered or unresolved. Based on these findings, pedagogical implications are offered, in addition to suggestions for future research into collaborative reading tasks.

During the last decade, an increasing number of immigrants came to Korea mainly for getting jobs and following their spouses, and the Korean government attempted to introduce several policies and projects. Among those policies and projects, the bilingual teacher development program was launched for developing bilingual teachers to teach their cultures and languages to multicultural and general students as well. The purpose of this research was to find out what multicultural immigrant women who participated in a bilingual teacher development program wanted to obtain from the program, and possibly to suggest aiming at developing a teacher training program for the future. Twelve pre-service bilingual teachers who were being trained in bilingual teacher development program participated in the pre- and post-questionnaire surveys. The results of the study are as follows. First, 12 pre-service bilingual teachers fully understood their roles as bilingual teachers and they think they are prepared to carry out those roles through the training program and the practicum. However, after the practicum they recognized they need to deepen their knowledge on child psychology, counseling and material development. Next, the pre-service teachers were satisfied with the training program and the courses they took in the program would be helpful to work as a bilingual teacher. However, they demand more practicum in the training curriculum. Some suggestions are made for improving the current system of practicum in the bilingual teacher training curriculum.

The Korea Immigration & Integration Program (KIIP) by the Ministry of Justice offers social integration education in order to educate immigrants about Korean language and culture. This paper presents a case study on the development of Korean language textbooks for KIIP. Korean Language and Culture for Immigrants (Intermediate Levels 1 and 2) is used as a teaching material at 308 social integration education institutions. This paper introduced its development procedure and method, its development directions, the organization of its syllabus, and the content of its units. Its development process involved analyzing purposes of social integration education and of needs of incumbent teachers to develop a teaching material to meet the goals of social integration. Efforts were made to closely connect the content of Korean study to that of culture study with a focus on making culture study lead to an overall understanding of South Korean society and to serve fully as a preparation process to acquire Korean nationality. This paper will hold its value as a guideline to be consulted for the development of Korean language textbooks for immigrants and help teachers make efficient use of textbooks according to the objectives of education in a social integration program.

The purpose of this study is to investigate university students’ perceptions on their English conversation classes taught by native English speakers. Its focus is on finding out how well the students understand and how actively they participate in class, what causes difficulty in their understanding or participation in class, and whether their class helps them in terms of affective aspects and English skills. A survey was conducted on a total of 465 university students in Korea, and the collected data were analyzed to compute basic descriptive and inferential statistics. Some of the important findings are 1) over 50% of the students understand their classes well; 2) a little over 30% actively participate in class; 3) about 30~50% of the students perceive their class help them affectively; and 4) about 50% of the students perceive their class help them improve their English skills in general. These results are discussed along with other findings related to the causes of the difficulties that the students experienced. Suggestions are provided on the basis of the results and their implications.

This study examines the difficulty of reading text in elementary school English textbooks. Four elementary school English textbook series published by three publishers were evaluated by Word Critical Factor (WCF). WCF considers cognitive demands for word recognition; it assesses the match of linguistic content in the text with the phonetically regular and high-frequency words that are associated with particular stages of reading development. For the analysis, all of the words that appeared in the reading and writing sections from four elementary school English textbooks were analyzed by two criteria, that is, the ratio of high frequency words and phonetically regular words among 100 running words, and the number of unique words in each textbook. The results showed that all four textbooks’ difficulty levels were very high considering the learner’s reading ability. This was due to the textbooks having a low repetition of words and also the complicated vowel patterns that were above the reading abilities of students. All of these factors combined are what have caused the difficulties presented in English textbooks. In conclusion, although the reading text introduces a variety of genres and activities for the development of reading skills, most reading text could not assist the reader’s cognitive processing.

This study explores the morphological awareness of different graders with different vocabulary levels. A total of 275 elementary students (148 5th graders and 127 6th graders) across small, midium and large cities are selected to test their morphological awareness. First, they were divided into 30%, 40% and 30% of students according to their vocabulary levels. Second, they were tested on the recognition tests, the production tests and the distributional tests of English derivational morphemes divided by the prefixes and the suffixes appeared in the English textbooks. The results are: The recognition and production tests show significant differences for both vocabulary levels and different English levels across different grades. However, the distributional test shows no clear difference like the other two tests. Based on the results, the study draws the conclusion that morphological awareness is developing in the order of recognition, production and distribution of morphologized words in sentences. In other words, recognition of forms precedes the production of forms, and the production is followed by the functional awareness of morphologized words.

Automated error detection and feedback systems are becoming an important component of online writing practice services for ESL/EFL (English as a second/foreign language) learners. The main purposes of the study are to: (a) collect samples of essays written by ESL learners with different native language (or L1) backgrounds that are error-coded by an early version of an automated error-detection system (CritiqueTM) and trained human coders; and (b) identify some unique patterns of writing errors for different first language (L1) groups. Data analyzed in this study included 18, 439 TOEFL◯R CBT essays error-coded by CritiqueTM and a much smaller, combined sample of 480 TOEFL◯R CBT/TOEFL iBT◯R essays error-coded by trained human coders. A comparison of error rates across five different language groups showed some unique patterns: (a) the Arabic and Spanish groups were the highest on both spelling and punctuation errors; (b) the Korean and Japanese groups had the highest article error frequency; and (c) the Chinese group had the highest number of errors related to verb conjugations or adjective and noun inflections. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of understanding the nature of L1-related writing errors and enhancing the automated error detection and feedback systems.

Laufer, Elder, Hill, and Congdon (2004) proposed the vocabulary strength framework reflecting the process of vocabulary knowledge development with a hierarchical order of four strength modalities: passive recognition, active recognition, passive recall, and active recall. Employing this framework, the present study aims to empirically examine its generalizability to EFL contexts and further explore its availability to validating the TEPS vocabulary section. Three sets of web-based tests for three proficiency groups (beginner (n=37), intermediate (n=31), and advanced (n=30)) are developed with words from three frequency bands (3000, 5000, and 7000). The test includes four sections representing four strength modes and an optional TEPS section for the two upper groups. A one-parameter Rasch model analysis reveals that item difficulties agree to the hierarchical sequence of difficulty order in the framework. Different vocabulary growth rates were found across modes and word bands. The TEPS item difficulties that are closer to recall than recognition may give a theoretical account of the measuring construct that the TEPS items tap upon.

This study investigated L2 production, perception, and the relation of production and perception by examining 20 Korean learners’ production and perception of the English contrasts of /ʃ/ vs. /ʃi/, /ʧ/ vs. /ʧi/, and /ʤ/ vs. /ʤi/ in word final position. Of the 20 Korean learners, 10 (5 males, 5 females) were low in English proficiency and the other 10 (5 males, 5 females) were high. Our findings from production and perception experiments showed that the relation of L2 production and perception varies according to learners’ proficiency levels in L2. A significant correlation between L2 production and perception was attested within the high group learners. Thus, the high group learners with higher production accuracy generally exhibited higher perception accuracy. Unlike the high group, the low group learners’ production and perception patterns did not show any significant correlation between the two. In general, the low group displayed higher accuracy in production than in perception. In addition, within the low group, the heavy influence of L1 constraints on L2 perception was attested while L2 production was not in accordance with L1 phonology.

The world Englishes framework gravitating around many recent models of English has initiated sharp interest in adopting intercultural awareness and its teaching/learning in English language instruction. This is because English has become ‘a heterogeneous language with multiple norms and grammars’ (Canagarajah, 2006) and no longer an international language but an ‘intercultural language’ (Sifakis, 2004). Intercultural English language teaching (IcELT) aims to create interculturally multidialectical English users among world Englishes by not only developing cultural tolerance and linguistic and cultural diversity but abating the so-called native-speakers’ linguistic and cultural dominances. For this, this article suggests eight workable IcELT guidelines which could facilitate users’ IcELT competence. This article, for its organization, first addresses why IcELT in relation to the world Englishes framework should be dealt in the contemporary ELT arena. Secondly, it suggests the eight IcELT guidelines along with some classroom techniques; thus, teachers of English language will benefit in his/her future lesson plans.

This study aims to investigate English teachers’ anxiety at three different school levels in Korea with special attention to situations where anxiety is generated. A mixed method was adopted to explore English teachers’ anxiety. Quantitative data from 912 English teachers was obtained through an online survey and qualitative data was collected from focus group interviews which were conducted with three different groups of primary (n=4), middle (n=3), and high school (n=3) teachers. Quantitative data analysis showed that there were no significant differences in the level of anxiety according to three school levels, although the anxiety of English teachers gradually increases from primary to high school. On the whole, there were significant differences in anxiety according to teaching experience; teachers with less than three years of teaching experience showed the highest anxiety. Three themes emerged from the analysis of the qualitative data: fear of negative evaluation, different sources of anxiety relating to teaching experiences in the three school levels, and classroom English vs. spontaneous English. These three themes showed that English teachers’ anxiety needs to be understood in the context of anxiety-provoking situations where they are being evaluated by their colleagues about their teaching methods and English language proficiency. Pedagogical implications are discussed based on the findings of the study.

This study explores university students’ revising behaviors in the peer assessment process. The data for this study were collected from 18 college students taking English critical writing courses. The results of this study show that the students’ feedback on critical writing significantly affect their revising behaviors. That is, the students’ feedback had substantial variability in the process of revising and improving their critical essays. Specifically, it was found that the students revised their essays more in surface levels by self-reflection and peer feedback and more in meaning levels by teacher feedback. In addition, the students’ perceptions of peer assessment appeared to be related to the extent of their experience of peer assessment and their revision work by peer feedback. The students considered peer assessment useful and helpful for improving their writing skills. This peer assessment induces learning and promotes further learning beyond what the students currently know or are able to do. The results inform L2 writing test developers and researchers about the extent to which peer assessment affects students’ learning and improves their writing abilities. Based on the findings in this study, the implications related to the assessment policy are also discussed.

This study adopts a flow theory perspective to investigate the learning engagement levels of 224 Korean high school students during EFL classes and the factors that may relate to differences in their engagement. Engagement was defined as the simultaneous experience of concentration, interest, and enjoyment. The experience sampling method was employed to measure 10th and 11th graders’ appraisals of instructional activities. Each participant was sampled twice randomly during each of three observed lessons. Momentary levels of engagement were examined in relation to students’ appraisals of activity qualities (importance for future goals, difficulty, possessed skills/competence in the area of the activity), and contextual factors (gender, grade, teacher, ability-track). Descriptive analyses, ANOVAs, and t-tests revealed that only 13% of the students were optimally engaged in lessons that were predominantly teacher-centered; increased engagement was associated with students’ appraisals of activity importance for future goals and with feelings of competence; and learner group engagement differed according to who taught them. Some teachers seemed to use an approach more conducive to engagement.

The purpose of this study was to study how L2 motivations in both Dörnyei’s (2005, 2009) L2 Motivational Self System and Gardner’s (1985) socio-educational model were related to intrinsic and extrinsic subscales in the self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) in Korean college contexts. This study investigated the relationships among the motivational variables by the use of the correlation method and the effects of L2 motivations on motivated behavior through multiple regression analysis. The findings showed Gardner’s (1985) integrativeness and ideal L2 self were strongly correlated with the more self-determined types of motivations, while L2 learning experience and ought-to L2 self were associated with the less self-determined ones in the self-determination theory. In addition, Dörnyei’s (2005, 2009) L2 Motivational Self System and the extrinsic motivation subscales, identified regulation and external regulation, explained Korean college students’ motivated behavior better than Gardner’s (1985) integrativeness. The theoretic discussions are made at the conclusion.