The aim of this study was to help elementary English teachers in Korea be more effective English teachers. This study discussed the concept of sociolinguistic features (face, address terms, and interjections) from an interactional sociolinguistics perspective. For this study, a native teacher’s English art classes (2nd grade) were recorded three times and carefully transcribed with the help of three native students in the University of Mississippi; informal interviews were done for checking some matters. Many differences between the native teacher’s utterances and the sentences in Classroom English published by the government of Korea were found. In terms of face, four patterns were found: from indirect to direct face threat, using ‘we’, using ‘if’, and changing to questioning. In the notion of address terms, two unique patterns were found: using titles such as ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ for politeness, and using nicknames such as ‘honey’ and ‘missy’ for solidarity or politeness. In the notion of interjections, three patterns were found: ‘OK’, ‘Now’, and ‘Howdy.’ On the basis of this study, it could be implied that, first, Classroom English should focus on contextual meanings as well as conventional meanings in instruct stages or teaching language skills, second, classroom English should make other categories for dealing with interjections such as ‘OK’, ‘Now’, and ‘Howdy’, and last, Classroom English should deal with some cultural knowledge for teachers.

This study was conducted to explore the possibility and potential of developing a new EFL (English as a Foreign language) curriculum which aims to promote foreign language learning and enhance students’ understanding of the world. For this purpose, the study examined the integration of poetry and dialogue journal writing within an EFL curriculum. The Data collection consisted of a survey, interviews, samples of dialogue journal writing, a classroom video recording, the classroom teacher’s journal and the researcher’s field note and journal. Both quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed to address the research question: What happens when EFL students read poetry within a response-oriented framework? Data analysis revealed that: 1) The students showed positive attitudes and beliefs toward using poetry through response-based instruction, 2) Students perceived that poetry and dialogue journal writing were a good resource for promoting English language, and 3) Students extended their learning experiences through their transactional readings of poetry. The study suggests that poetry and dialogue journal writing hold the potential to develop EFL curricula.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate what the memory representation of L2 text is like based on the Causal Network Model. In order to do that, 8 stories were read in English by Korean students and recalled in Korean. Their recall was analysed in terms of the number of causal connections each sentence has as specified in the model. And then it was compared with the results of Kim (2001) where Korean students read and recalled the same stories in Korean. The overall amount of recall was not different between L1 and L2 texts, but the pattern of recall showed differences in terms of the causal structure proposed by Causal Network Model. While the recall of L1 text was nicely accounted for by the number of causal connections specified in the model, the recall of individual goal statements in L2 text did not reflect the causal structure. Interesting was the finding that the more important goal among the two goal statements was recalled better for L2 than for L1 text.

The task-based approach to second or foreign language pedagogy aims to provide learners with a natural context for authentic language use. While learners are performing real-world or pedagogical tasks, they have opportunities not only to get a rich and comprehensible input of real language, but also to produce target language items to exchange meanings. Interaction in doing the tasks is thought to facilitate language learning process. Thus, one of the important things that teachers have to do first for their task-based English classes is to design tasks for target language items reflecting native speakers’ authentic language use. It is expected that learners can communicate with foreigners using the prescriptive target language items outside the classroom. This research attempted to find out if non-native English teachers would be able to make accurate predictions about target language items in terms of language forms and lexical phrases that would naturally occur when English native speakers carried out two types of tasks (closed tasks and open tasks). The results showed that many language items predicted by non-native English teachers did not appear in the recorded data by English native speakers, especially for open tasks. Thus, this research called into question the practice of setting tasks at the end of a PPP cycle (presentation, practice, and production), to allow students to put into use target language items that has previously been practised.

A field-specific essay test was developed as an attempt to improve the ESL placement procedure for international graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Graduate departments were classified into four areas, business, humanities/social sciences, technology and life sciences, and a set of four input prompts, and writing questions was developed. A total of 124 volunteers participated in taking both the regularly-required general-topic test and the field-specific test. A total-group FACETS analysis of the students’ performance on the two tests showed that they performed better on the field-specific test. However, subgroup analyses showed the field-specific topic effect only in the business and life sciences subgroups, while no prompt effect was found for the humanities/social sciences and technology subgroups. Considering that early in the test development procedure, these results were predicted by in a prompt evaluation session, the results suggest that more effort should be exerted to carefully select the topic and content of prompts in order to secure equivalency of the topic effect across all disciplinary groups. This paper further addresses limitations and promising research directions.