Researchers in second language acquisition have claimed that the teacher-student setting of the typical L2 classroom may not provide an optimal environment for negotiation of meaning. This claim, however, has been based on quantitative analyses without examination of the actual negotiation process. From a different point of view, namely, a socioconstructivist perspective, this study focuses on how a teacher supported students during negotiations of meaning and how the students contributed to those negotiations in an intermediate ESL classroom. The findings show that the teacher’s scaffolding played a crucial role in constructive negotiations. She continuously checked the students’ levels of comprehension and searched for better ways to resolve comprehension problems. In addition, she assisted the students as they modified their utterances to resolve communication breakdowns. She also offered help by mediating the students’ successful communication between each other. For their part, the students contributed their own scaffolding to assist class members who were having difficulty comprehending and producing language during their negotiations with the teacher. Those findings suggest that collaborative negotiation of meaning between teacher and student in the classroom is rich in learning opportunities.

This paper considers various marked practices by which speakers of English refer to people, including themselves and others, when conversing with their interlocutors. It shows that parties in a conversation sometimes deploy marked ways of reference in order to accomplish various non-referential (i.e., interactional) undertakings. This paper aims to contribute not only to a better understanding of English speakers' referential practices, but also to the teaching of English to Korean leamers to whom these marked language use may not be well known. The knowledge of these marked uses can be a very useful interactional resource for the leamers and may obviate possible interactional troubles when they interact in the target culture.

The purpose of this paper is to review the policy of foreign language education in France and to analyze its effects in primary and secondary schools, including the changes that have recent1y taken place. Under the assumption that languages ref1ect their culture, the administrative of France has tried to co、rer a variety of languages in Europe and to improve the quality of foreign language education. These efforts, however, appear to be unsuccessful due to the financial problems and the heavy emphasis on particular languages based on the social and economical reasons. Nevertheless, these efforts are valued highly, and provide some insights to the cωurre Korea.

The pronunciation of Sino-Korean is different from Modern Chinese, which brings negative mother tongue transfer effect to Korean students‘ pronunciation, listening and speaking abilities. To reduce the negative transfer effect and to improve Korean students’ listening ability, the author compares and analyzes the initial consonants of Sino-Korean with 2500 frequently used initial consonants of Chinese words taken from the Modern Chinese Common Character List, instituted on January 1988, by the State Language Commission and the State Education Commission of China. This comparative study presents a full overview of the pronunciation difference between Chinese Mandarin and Sino-Korean, which provides valuable guidance for students in learning and understanding those differences.

El propósito de este estudio es analizar los 1,471 errores recopilados en las clases de conversación española de una universidad y señalar cómo el análisis del error desempeña un papel relevante en el proceso de la enseñanza/aprendizaje de español. Después del análisis a todos los errores, se clasificaron cuatro categorías según su origen: errores simples (morfológicos), errores por la interferencia, errores gramaticales y errores lógicos. A su vez, cada categoría incluyó subdivisiones, según el contenido gramatical, y por último se seleccionaron veintiún tipos de errores a los que se les dio un porcentaje. Algunos de los resultados obtenidos en este análisis son: primero, cerca del 63 ó 75% (según los niveles) de los errores derivan de confusiones gramaticales y apenas un 9 ó 12% se atribuyen a interferencias de la lengua materna y del inglés; segundo, en algunos casos o tipos, los estudiantes de nivel alto cometen más errores que los de nivel bajo y esto se puede explicar a partir de una estrategia de ‘evitación’, empleada por los últimos; tercero, con respecto a los estudiantes del nivel bajo, muchos de los errores no satisfacen el mínimo de los requisitos estructurales; así que para ellos, antes de la corrección del error, se debe ofrecer mucha atención a los modelos de la oración española.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of English oral presentation strategy training (OPST) in EFL contexts. For this study, eight university students of 4 high and 4 low proficiency level are selected. The participants were provided with an OPST over 5 weeks including 8 times of training. During the OPST, the participants learned 25 strategy, 17 verbal and 8 non-verbal strategies. The verbal strategies were again divided into two parts: general verbal strategies and genre specific strategies. For the validity of the present study a “triangulation” was achieved through the use of video recording, classroom observation, questionnaire, in-depth interview, and the native English speaker’s evaluation. The results of the study demonstrated that the participants showed some improvement in the use of presentation strategies, especially organizational and verbal components of the strategies rather than nonlinguistic components. The proficiency level of the participants had an effect on the frequency of use of strategies after the OPST. Overall, the OPST was found to have positive effects on the participants’ attitude toward English oral presentations. On the basis of the results of the study, some teaching implications for improving presentation skills in university EAP contexts are provided.

Effective foreign language learning accompanies the learning of the target language’s culture. But English is said to be not a foreign language, but a global language. What should culture learning be like in teaching English as a global language (EGL)? This paper aims to make some suggestions for the directions of cultural learning in EGL. First, the features of EGL learning are explored in comparison with those of EFL learning. Second, it is discussed why EGL learning does not match the communicative competence on which the communicative approach has been based. Instead EGL learning needs intercultural communicative competence (ICC). Third, it is considered what culture education should take into account for ICC. The main section seeks out the ways in which cultural contents involved in teaching materials contribute to develop ICC. Four (4) series of Korean middle school English textbooks are analysed in respect of the ownership of cultures, the types of culture and the cultural activities, from the intercultural perspective. The result admits the cultural contents of the textbook are not suitable for developing ICC. Finally, some directions will be deduced on how and what teaching materials are equipped to develop ICC in teaching English as a global language.

This study attempts to examine the existence of foreign language anxiety in e-Learning situations, and then identify relationships between the anxiety and learner background factors. A total of 162 EFL learners participated in the survey. Their anxiety was measured by the e-Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (e-FLCAS). The results suggest that foreign language learners do indeed experience anxiety in e-Learning classrooms. A majority of the participants acknowledged having experienced specific kinds of anxiety in cyber classes: worry over e-Learning education, online test anxiety, learning style conflicts, and apprehension of native teachers. In addition, e-Learning anxiety was found to be significantly related to three background factors (gender, academic backgrounds, and English proficiency). The results also provide a potential explanation of anxiety-producing contexts in cyber classrooms, the sources of anxiety, and coping strategies that students use to lower their anxiety.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate English education experts’ current general views on the college English curriculum at Korean provincial universities and elicit their consensus of opinion on the distinctive characteristics of the curriculum. For that purpose, two rounds of the delphi survey were presented to forty experts, with thirty one experts’ responses in the first round and nineteen in the second. Based on their responses, the following characteristics of the Korean college English curriculum for provincial universities were deduced as a consensus of opinion: the curriculum is supposed to be more intensive, practical, proficiency-based, and university-specific than the curriculum for the universities in the Metropolitan area; it is supposed to be English for Specific Purposes (ESP) rather than English for General Purposes (EGP) in order to promote the future career of the individual provincial university students and the competitiveness of the provincial universities themselves.

With the increasing prevalence of e-learning courses in higher education, it is important to investigate how the courses are being run and examine students’ perceptions of e-learning courses to provide an optimal learning environment. An end-of-course, summative evaluation and log files in an e-learning system were used in order to describe the characteristics and students’ perceptions of three e-learning English courses in a university. The section of background information in the evaluation showed that the majority of the students taking the courses are seniors, majoring in humanities and social sciences. Factors were found to influence students’ satisfaction with the courses such as use of various multimedia, interactions between instructor and students, and among students, and instructors’ evaluation of students’ achievement. A post-hoc analysis showed evidence significant differences existed by course. These findings of the study suggest that quality assurance is an issue in setting and managing e-learning English courses, which are expected to grow rapidly in a near future due to students’ increasing need for e-learning.

This paper reports the current situation of English and English education in North Korea. Two approaches are taken to achieve the goal: One is to examine social attitudes and government approaches to English education. Interviews with defectors from North Korea, newspaper reports and other related literature are used. The other is to analyze middle school English textbooks and research articles to reveal the current practice of English language teaching at schools. The results show that North Korean government and people are interested in learning and teaching English and they take various measures to improve English learning to meet national or individual goals. English seems to be considered as a way of improving their economic situations and finding a better opportunity for many North Korean people. However, English education in North Korea is still limited in terms of resources including learning materials and native teachers of English. Also academic research and practices in English education are still heavily influenced by Kim Ilsung and Kim Jungil’s words so that scientific investigations are limited. It is an impending issue to narrow a gap in English education between South and North Koreas to overcome difficulties encountered in the future.

The deficiency of competent native English speaker raters and the inherent problem with intra-rater and inter-rater reliability of the oral proficiency interview (OPI) has precluded the full-fledged implementation of English performance testing, inevitably ushering in the computer- based oral proficiency interview (COPI) as its viable alternative with the help of automatic speech recognition (ASR). The plausibility and feasibility of implementing ASR-based COPI has recently been investigated with favorable results, which warrants more sophisticated research focusing on development of desirable test methods that will meet the rigorous criteria required by high-stakes language tests. In this respect, employing varied statistical methods as correlational, regression analyses, and ANOVA, the present study attempts to explore strengths and limitations of test method facets and to identify valid test methods to maximize the validity and reliability of ASR-based COPⅠ. Within the theoretical framework of communicative language components to be measured, the statistical findings reveal that some test methods prove to be more effective than others in producing COPI test results with better discriminability and reliability. The survey of students and teachers also suggest their favorable attitudes toward utilizing the COPI for in-class evaluation. Both findings strongly corroborates potential of the COPI in question as a valid performance testing tool to measure overall communicative competence. The current research is expected not only to shed light on advancement of performance testing, but also to serve the purpose of enhancing communicative English teaching.

The current study has two research questions: 1) Are EFL students’ ratings comparable with the advanced or native TESOL graduates’ ratings? 2) What are the significant variables that discriminate one self-marked proficiency group from another? To address question 1, 90 Korean EFL learners rated 3 sample essays on a 5-scale with four writing features (organization, content, language use, and holistic feature), Twenty-five TESOL graduates also rated the sample essays given the same scoring rubric. The students’ ratings then were compared to the ratings of TESOL graduates. To address research question 2, 100 students’ responses to 10 survey items were analyzed, using discriminant analysis (DA). The result showed 1) that significant difference were observed in a few analytic features between students’ ratings and colleagues’ ratings, and 2) that the students who marked themselves as high-proficient writers were likely to respond with confidence that their ratings were accurate. In conclusion, differing L2 proficiency level is partly, but not fully associated with rating performance in subjects who are able to read and comprehend English sentences. On the other hand, L2 proficiency influenced student raters’ perception.