This study examined the effects of teaching contextual inference and word association strategies on 5th grade elementary school students' vocabulary knowledge development. A total of 56 students participated in the current study, as divided into either the contextual inference group or the word association group. The vocabulary proficiency levels of the participants were also considered and the students in each group were further divided into either the upper level group or the lower level group. The participants experienced six treatment sessions, and in each session they had to study five vocabulary items using each of the two vocabulary learning strategies. The posttest and delayed posttest results indicated that both strategies were effective for the vocabulary knowledge development of the upper level group as well as the lower level group. Some possible implications for elementary school English classrooms in Korea are discussed.

The present study explores the effects of peer intimacy on Korean primary English learners' collaborative group work in terms of writing achievement and peer interaction. Fifty six elementary school students engaged in small group work on English writing tasks. They were grouped in three different types: high intimacy level group, low intimacy level group, and random group. The study results indicated no significant group differences in the students' abilities and attitudes of English writing. However, the three groups differed in the quantity and quality of peer interaction. The high intimacy group produced the largest number of utterance and the most collaborative interactions. The low intimacy group, on the other hand, produced more utterances but less collaborative interactions than did the random group. Overall, the study results suggested that peer intimacy may have no immediate effect on students' learning through small group work but it possibly has delayed effects in prolonged group work by mediating the quantity and quality of peer interactions. Limitations of the study and pedagogical suggestions are provided.

The study analyzes English for Specific Purposes(ESP) needs of law school students and lawyers for developing English for Legal Purposes(ELP) courses in Korea. In order to investigate pedagogic needs of the learners and target needs of the domain experts, 74 law school students and 50 lawyers who were in charge of legal cases were interviewed and surveyed. The content of the questionnaire consisted of pedagogic and target needs about lawyer's tasks and open questions and comments about English education for law school students. The results of the analysis showed that learners' main need for studying English is conducting legal research and in communicating with others. The results of the language function analysis indicated that understanding legal terminology, reviewing provisions of law, writing a legal memo, legal translation, evaluating information to determine compliance with standards are considered important. The results also showed the differences in the importance ranking of function and type of language skills between the learner group and the domain expert group.

It's long been noted that a serious discrepancy exists between elementary school English classes and middle school English classes. This study explores the differences in the teacher talks of elementary and middle school classrooms. To this end, three elementary school English classes and three middle school English classes are tape-recorded, and their teacher utterances are analyzed according to forms of utterances, functions of utterances and language types. The result shows that elementary school English teachers use significantly more command forms and feedback than middle school English teachers while they use significantly more non-class related utterances more than elementary school teachers. They utter class-related managerial and disciplinary categories significantly more than middle school English teachers while they do miscellaneous categories significantly more than elementary school teachers. In terms of languages teachers use in the classroom, elementary school teachers speaks English significantly more than middle school English teachers. Elementary school teachers tend to use plain Korean to individual students while using formal Korean to the whole class. Middle school teachers tend to use formal Korean irrespective of whole group, small group and individual students.

The present study investigates affective factors which affect primary English teachers' professionalism. For the analysis of the study, quantitative data was obtained from 576 primary school English teachers who responded to a questionnaire. Qualitative data was also collected from three different focus group interviews and ten individual interviews. A quantitative data analysis shows that collective teacher-efficacy is the best predictor of primary school English teachers' professionalism among the three factors of self-efficacy, organization-based self-esteem, and collective self-efficacy. This result is consistent with interview data which shows that more positive than negative comments are observed in regards to collective teacher-efficacy. Pedagogical implications have been discussed.

The present study investigated a washback effect regarding vocabulary test format and students' learning outcomes. Ninety-three Korean university students in English reading courses were given a vocabulary pre-test and pre-treatment survey. Then they were divided into three groups. A control group was taught how to write a summary in English and a receptive vocabulary knowledge group was taught how to study vocabulary, then both of these groups were instructed that they would have a receptive vocabulary knowledge test. A productive vocabulary knowledge group was taught how to study vocabulary and told that they would have a productive vocabulary knowledge test. After 15 weeks, they all were given a post-vocabulary test consisting of both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge items, and post-treatment survey. Results indicated that the productive vocabulary knowledge group showed the best outcomes overall. Its students earned significantly higher scores on the productive vocabulary knowledge post-test than the other groups. Regarding the receptive vocabulary knowledge post-test, it featured scores similar to the receptive vocabulary knowledge group, which had the highest scores. Moreover, the productive vocabulary knowledge group's pre- and post-treatment survey data revealed that its students had improved their ability to use the vocabulary learning strategies that were taught.

This study investigated the effects of reducing the number of options in multiple-choice items on the psychometric characteristics of the English section of the NAEA (National Assessment of Educational Achievement). The purpose of the NAEA is to measure educational progress and achievement and it is administered to all sixth, ninth, and eleventh grade Korean students annually. The English section for the ninth graders is the focus of this study; it is made up of thirty-four five-option multiple-choice items and six constructed-response items. A five-option, multiple-choice English test was converted to a four- and a three-option version by eliminating the least and the second least frequently chosen options. Item difficulty, item discrimination, guessing, reliability, and information function were computed as a function of the number of options. This study employed the 3-parameter IRT model. Results showed that there were no significant differences among the three means of item difficulty as well as item discrimination indices; however, the inspection of the test information function indicated that the five-option version generally yielded the highest amount of test information function over the ability scale. Results indicate that streamlined three- or four-option versions are not likely to function as well as the five-option version at the test level.

This paper investigates the differences in college learners' perceptions and correlations of factors related to willingness to communicate (WTC) in an English mediated instruction (EMI) class. Based on a survey of 50 collegiates (33 males, 17 females) and two rounds of interviews with 15 students, the t-tests showed that there were not many statistical differences depending on learner characteristics except the learners' grade difference affecting their perception of improvement in English. However, depending on the course types, the Kruskal-Wallis test showed statistically significant differences in the categories of present level of participation, expected level of participation with L1 option, question & answer, group collaboration, active listening, and preference to EMI with L1 option. Furthermore, the factors of WTC appeared strongly correlated with their perceptions on the improvement in English, increased confidence, and the extent of learning in the EMI class. According to qualitative analyses of open-ended questions in the survey and interviews, the learners thought group presentations in English were most difficult. They also responded that their low English proficiency, peer pressure, and the student-orientedness in class made them passive and less confident. The learners, however, adopted diverse coping strategies to overcome such difficulties. They were also positive about the limited use of L1 in the EMI class. Implications for EMI are suggested.

The purpose of this study was to explore pre-service teachers' reflectivity occurring in their first-person reflection on their experience, by examining how they defined a problem and suggested its solution. For the research purpose, this study adopted Dewey's (1933) idea of reflection from which the definition of reflection in much research on teachers' reflections originated. This study analyzed the problem sections occurring in their reflection after first teaching practice, in terms of focus and depth of problem solving. The total number of the sections was seventy-nine and on average each participant's teaching journal involved three sections of a problem. Examination of focus of reflection was done as to 'agent of problem' and 'target of reflection', whereas an analysis of the depth of their reflection was done in terms of the number of dimensions and combination of dimensions of problem solving. The findings showed that much more focus of the pre-service teachers' reflection was put on the performance inside the classroom than outside. That is, the interaction between the teacher and the student was their primary concern. Also, the findings indicated that over half of the problem sections were beyond the superficial level of reflective thinking, but one third of the problem sections stayed still within the superficial depth of reflection. This suggested the necessity of providing guidelines on the focus and depth of reflection when reflection was employed as a tool of pre-service teacher's professional development.

This study attempted to investigate the relative contribution of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge to second language reading comprehension ability. With 44 EFL adult learners whose language proficiency fell within the low-intermediate level, three different measures were conducted: vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were measured by researcher-developed tests and L2 reading comprehension was measured using the reading section of the TOEIC test. In order to examine the two predicting variables (i.e., vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) a multiple regression analysis was performed. The study found that both grammatical and vocabulary knowledge related significantly to L2 reading comprehension. Additionally, vocabulary knowledge showed a slightly stronger contribution to reading comprehension than syntactic knowledge. These findings suggest that it is equally important for lower level readers to understand vocabulary as well as basic syntactic rules and structures when it comes to EFL reading comprehension.

A study was conducted to investigate the levels of representation in memory constructed as an outcome of L2 reading comprehension, and the effects of L2 proficiency, prior knowledge, and L1 reading skills on the construction of the representation. A total number of 128 Korean EFL learners participated in the study. Their L2 reading comprehension was tested through verification measure and comprehension questions designed to assess different levels of understanding including the sentence-level, textbase understanding and the situation model, or the deeper level of understanding of what the text is about. Results showed that the representation the L2 readers constructed was characterized as consisting of rather loose textbase understanding and relatively weak, but varying degrees of, situational understanding. Only L2 proficiency, among the three factors, appeared to have a significant effect on the levels of understanding in the representation the L2 readers constructed.

Tingginya minat masyarakat Korea dalam pembelajaran bahasa Indonesia harus diimbangi dengan sistem pengajaran yang efektif dan efisien. Artikel ini menjelaskan masalah dan tantangan pengajaran Bahasa Indonesia untuk penutur asing dua dimensi sehingga dapat digunakan sebagai pedoman bagi guru dan peneliti. Metode yang digunakan adalah metode kualitatif. Subyek penelitian adalah masalah dan tantangan pengajaran Bahasa Indonesia untuk penutur asing dua dimensi. Obyek penelitian adalah semester pertama HUFS siswa kampus global dan karyawan Samsung yang telah mempelajari bahasa Indonesia selama 300 jam di HUFS kampus global. Kemudian, penelitian ini dijelaskan secara deskriptif. Dari hasil, diketahui bahwa kedua dimensi pengajaran menghasilkan produk yang berbeda. Secara teoritis dan praktis, keterampilan bahasa peserta kursus lebih baik dari mahasiswa semester pertama HUFS. Hal ini dipengaruhi oleh kemauan dan motivasi dalam belajar bahasa Indonesia. Selain itu, sistem pengajaran yang berbeda juga mempengaruhi itu. Namun, itu merupakan tantangan bagi guru untuk merancang metode pengajaran yang efektif dan efisien.

This article aims to reveal the boundary between humor and murye/bulson. Murye/bulson and humor are one of the inferences aspects of conversational implicature. Mechanisms to consider murye/bulson as humor present as follows: multiple indirectness and virtual world in the contexts understood to be untrue, existences sympathized within familiarity, conversions of implicature, setting, relation and area. These mechanisms permit to deviate from individual responsibility and offset murye/bulson. On the other hand, according to bulson implicature, there are situational·relational conditions that humor is not allowed any more as humor: Korea's sensitive topics cling to previous negative situations·emotions, invasion of privacy against expected values, gender inequality, class distinction, neglecting the weak, disparagement of appearance violating the limit of emotions and disregarding status.

This paper sought to analyze the frequency of appearance of final consonants in Korean in order to provide basic data for teaching foreign learners pronunciation. In this paper, the audio materials contained in the elementary textbooks, ‘Korean as a foreign language 1, 2’ were transcribed into Hangul and the frequencies of appearance of phonemes were analyzed using SynKDP ver 1.6. The results showed that the frequency of final consonants out of all phonemes was approximately 14%. Of the final consonants, 88% were shown to be sonorants /m, n, ŋ, I/ and 12% were shown to be obstruents /p˥, t˥, k˥/. The frequency of appearance of nasal sounds /m, n, ŋ/ was shown to be quite high at approximately 66%. The ratio of obstruents that became nasal sounds by the nasal assimilation, was shown to be approximately 16%. Lateral /l/ sound showed a frequency of 21% and only 1% of them were identified to be the result of the lateralization of obstruents. Meanwhile, approximately 74% of obstruent final consonants involved fortition, and only approximately 26% were pure obstruent final consonants. Finally, cases where the aspiratization occurred after neutralization were found in only 57 words out of 5,577 words in total. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to analyze usages and functions of quotation sentences and quotation verbs in newspaper texts. The newspaper quotes have the functions of factuality, neutrality, expressiveness, expert contribution, and personal involvement. If we analyze usages of quotation verbs, we can explain the functions of quotation sentences in newspaper texts. The corpus for the study consisted of newspaper texts from '21st Century Sejong Project' corpus. It comprises around 250,000 words in newspaper reports and around 250,000 words in newspaper editorial articles. I analyzed the quotation sentences and measured the ratio of frequency of quotation verbs. The results show that the citations of statement are more than the citations of thought in newspaper reports. But the citations of thought are comparatively frequent in newspaper editorial articles. From this we may know that journalists cite other's statements mostly in newspaper reports. But editors cite their thoughts and assertions in newspaper articles more than in newspaper reports. Using the quotation sentences in reports, the journalists express that cited statements are objective and authentic. And using the quotation sentences in editorial articles, the editors show foundation for their assertion. And '-다고 하-' in articles has function of periphrasis for declining to assert.

This study aims to compare the effects of different types of test-items using the same text and test-takers' text familiarity on the scores of English reading comprehension. A total of 312 third-grade Korean high school students took three different English tests, adapting types of test-items from the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT). Each test included items using the same texts, presented in exam preparation books published by EBS in Korea, but different question types. To estimate levels of their topic familiarity, two surveys were carried out. Repeated measures ANOVAs reveal that there were significant differences in scores among the items using the same text with different types of test-items. However, there was no statistically significant effect of topic familiarity. The results indicate a greater effect of different types of test-items than topic familiarity on the scores of a reading comprehension test using the same text. Based on the findings, it is suggested that English teachers in Korea need to manage their reading classes by using various types of questions in order to develop students' reading ability and to prepare their students for the CSAT.

This study aims to compare the English vocabulary used in Korean high school English textbooks with the one in the College Scholastic Ability Tests (afterwards CSAT) administered in the years of 2009-2013 by using a concordance program, NLPTools, and to make a list of vocabulary used only in CSAT. The findings are as follows: First, when compared with Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, the 'Basic Words List' shows a conformity rate of 98.78%. Second, in terms of TTR (Type Token Ratio), there is no noticeable difference among the English textbooks. Third, in the respect of TTR, CSATs show higher figures, which means that CSATs' vocabulary is more difficult than that in the English textbooks and that for CSATs, annually each test has shown a gradual increase in the number of valid types. (This shows that more valid types to be learned are needed for the preparation of CSAT. Also the degree of difficulty in CSAT is getting higher.) Lastly, the higher level of the 208 words which occur only in CSATs illustrates that the gap between the vocabulary level of textbooks and that of CSAT needs to be reduced for normalization of public education.

This study explored the effectiveness and second language (L2) writers' perceptions of process-oriented writing, using portfolio-basedinstruction in a secondary English class at general school settings. The participants were 110 high school students enrolled in a private independent school in Gyeonggi. They learned to produce a four-paragraph-English-essay based on the process-oriented writing methodology, keeping a portfolio note for the entire semester. The instructor was a bilingual teacher of English whose native language is Korean. The 17 weeks' records written in the portfolio note were analyzed to portray whether the approaches enhanced overall performance and understandings about essay-writing. Findings revealed that the participants were satisfied with this approach and improved their writing skills using portfolio-based- instruction. For the sake of implementing the new assessment appropriately at public school settings, further studies are suggested to develop how to enhance classroom environment in order to increase the degree of learner-satisfaction in the essay-writing classes.

This study suggests effectiveness of G-Learning (teaching and learning methodology utilizing interactions derived from game play) English afterschool class, which had been implemented for 3 months to 496 elementary school students in 5th grade at 31 elementary schools spread in the whole regions of Gyeonggi province. To achieve the goals of this study, two hypotheses were set in this study: 1) after conducting G-Learning English class, students' achievement in English study will increase, and 2) after conducting G-Learning English class, students' interest and confidence to English study will increase. Pre and post proficiency tests were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the G-Learning English class. A survey was also carried out with the participants of the class. The results showed that the students' achievement in reading was increased from 24.7 to 36.4 and vocabulary increased from 21.1 to 33.5 with statistical significance. The increase of the test score in three proficiency groups was as follow: high group was 9 points, middle group was 25 points, and low group was 38 points. Moreover, as for the affective factors toward English study, students' interest improved from 3.28 to 3.54 and confidence improved from 3.17 and all the aforementioned results showed statistical significance.

The aims of this study were to explore the value of integrated use of the related literary texts and movies through teachers' awareness toward them, and to develop English teaching-learning method using them. Thirty-four primary school teachers who enrolled a graduate course participated in the study. The teachers read a literary text, Because of Winn-Dixie written by Kate DiCamillo, and watched the movie based on the text. Data collected were analyzed through a mixed method which used both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The result of the study emerged in two steps. First, experiences of participating teachers were investigated in terms of understanding literary texts and movies, participants' experience as both English learners and teachers, and the understanding of complementary aspects of a literary text and the movie based on the text. Then, teaching-learning method for English learners were developed. For example, the study suggested how to develop four language skills through integrated use of the literary texts and movies, and provided a list of related literary texts and movies applicable in diverse EFL contexts. Based on the results, the study suggested teachers to apply methods and techniques to other literary texts and movies in the teaching of English in EFL settings.