This study investigates the current status of the Arabic–Korean and the Korean–Arabic communities interpreting in Korea and examines the curriculum available to community interpreters. Recently, the demand for community interpreters has increased significantly owing to the increase in the number of patients from Gulf countries, Yemeni refugees, Arab tourists, and Arab residents in Korea. Moreover, the demand for medical and judicial services and tourism interpreting reached the highest level in 2019. Although the demand has declined due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the international community is undertaking measures to end the pandemic, and the research on community interpreting shows that there will be a place for such services during preparation for the post-COVID-19 era. In particular, since the interpreting curriculum for bachelor’s and master’s courses is concentrated on conference interpreting, it is necessary to improve the curriculum so that it meets the needs of community interpreting. Therefore, this study investigates the current status of community interpreting over the past 10 years, analyzes the community interpreting curriculum operated by universities, graduate schools, and government agencies, and suggests the possible future direction of the curriculum for community interpreting.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation, online education has emerged as an important research field to match its growing necessity. In this vein, this research explores one of the challenges facing online teaching of the Arabic language to Korean students at the university level based on the practical experience of online teaching in the academic year of 2020 while focusing on the role of students. The main goal of this research is to give some answers to its main question, which is: How is it possible to activate the role of students in the online classes of the Arabic language? The study suggests some online activities through which the role of students in online classes can be activated. An online survey questionnaire was provided to test the influence of some of those activities and to explore the students’ feedback. Additionally, interviews were conducted with some students to gain further understanding of their opinions about those activities. The results of the study showed positive feedback from the students towards those activities and provided some advantages of using those online activities for adding enjoyment to the students’ assignments. It is also recommended that teachers include more innovative online activities which match their students’ needs.

With the development of technology, innovations are taking place in the education field, with smart device-based Chinese educational applications drawing attention. This study examines the current status of Chinese educational applications in Korea, China, and the U.S., and explores possible directions to design effective applications for Korean young learners. A total of 179 applications from three countries were investigated and classified based on educational application criteria. Among them, the top five applications were selected from each country using ratings and reviews. Each application was then evaluated and analyzed according to the evaluation criteria. The results demonstrated that applications from the U.S. were the highest scoring overall and highest in terms of content, with applications from China highest in terms of function. The result also presented three common problems, which are limited types of applications, the absence of camera function utilization, and the lack of learning activities to experience Chinese culture. This study recommends further discussions on Chinese educational applications with the broadened scope of application types and target learners.

The present study investigated students’ preferences for the types of tasks used to assess English speaking performance. It further examined whether students’ task type preferences affected their perceptions of test effectiveness. One hundred eighty-two high school students responded to a self-report questionnaire. A series of frequency analysis and paired samples t-tests were used for the analysis. The results showed that students’ most preferred task types and their least preferred ones overlapped with each other, suggesting that the task types of English-speaking performance tests used in schools are limited. The four key reasons determining students’ task type preferences were identified, including task difficulty, emotional comfort, practical value, and interest. In addition, the results indicated that students’ task type preferences could affect their perceptions of task effectiveness. Overall, the results suggest the need for developing more varied task types for English-speaking performance tests as well as helping students become familiar with English speaking performance tasks. Pedagogical implications were discussed along with study limitations.

This study employed a bibliometric method to visualize the evolution of corpus-based discourse studies between 1995 and 2019, with a total of 2,174 English-language documents and their 83,184 references collected from Scopus, the Social Science Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Co-citation analysis of the predominant authors, references, and publication sources disclosed that the field has expanded over the past 25 years from primary pattern analysis of descriptive and functional grammar to principal investigations of interdisciplinary issues, some of which are central to pragmatics and sociolinguistics. This shift of research focus is also evidenced by keyword analysis. Scholars have been progressively more fascinated by such social issues as news discourse, business discourse, gender and language, and identity. Some emerging topics like social media, media discourse, legal discourse, and the metadiscourse interpersonal model may represent research hotspots and trends in this area. Bibliometric approaches play an important role in providing hands-on evidence-based comparisons and visualizations of previous research outputs using different time bands.

This study investigated the relative predictive power of vocabulary depth and reading fluency on the reading comprehension of advanced Korean EFL learners in college. By doing so, the scope of paradigmatic relations, as part of vocabulary depth, was extended to encompass associative vocabulary as well as synonyms and antonyms, and reading fluency at the discourse level was considered. For this study, 139 college students were tested on a range of vocabulary depth tests, as well as reading comprehension and text-level reading fluency. The findings revealed that although both vocabulary depth and reading fluency are significant contributors to reading comprehension abilities, the predictability of vocabulary depth was larger than that of reading fluency. In addition, associative vocabulary not only revealed additional predictive power for reading comprehension on top of reading fluency, synonyms and antonyms, but also showed stronger predictability compared to synonyms and antonyms. These results highlight that both vocabulary depth, especially the knowledge of how words are related together, and text-level reading fluency play a crucial role in boosting the reading comprehension abilities of even advanced L2 readers.

With traditional in-person classes canceled due to the pandemic, teachers moved classes online, adapting new teaching methods. With this background, this study is aimed at exploring if flipped learning conducted through fully online systems improves students’ self-directed learning attitudes. Comparing a conventional flipped learning model with asynchronous online before-class sessions to offline during-class ones, this study replaced offline during-class sessions with synchronous online ones and tried to see if a variant form of flipped learning will be effective in promoting students’ self-directed learning attitudes over time. Twenty-two English major students participated in a variant of flipped learning for eight weeks. A pre- and a post-test were administered using a survey questionnaire adapted from Lee and Pyo (2018)’s four characteristics of self-directed learning attitudes: autonomy, responsibility, creativity, and self-concept. The research findings are as follows. First, there was a significant increase in all four characteristics of self-directed learning attitudes in the fully online flipped classroom. Second, two themes, ‘greater work efficiency online’ and ‘a unique group mechanism online’ were found from open-ended questions, and explain well why the online-only flipped learning model is conducive to developing students’ self-directed learning attitudes.

This study is undertaken to design a Korean presentation class for academic purposes based on CALLA (Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach) and to find its effectiveness. In this study, 10 foreign graduate students participated in the class which teaches presentation strategies for 15 weeks. According to CALLA, some useful presentation strategies were introduced and practiced repeatedly, and the students’ presentations in Korean considering their major were completed gradually. As a result, positive effects from the presentation class on the perspective of language, non-language and data organization could be acquired through repetitive feedback and practice. Thus, the students could use the proper discourse for topics ranging from the introduction and development of the presentation to concluding presentation. The learners have shown a lot of improvements in presentation ability through the CALLA course regardless of language proficiency but the class design used in the study should be conducted in other presentation classes for academic purposes.

This article considers the content and utilization of cultural elements that promote effective learning in Japanese language education classes, based on a survey and analysis of cultural elements that Korean learners of Japanese are interested in. Effective learning means that learners ‘discover’ their own culture in the process of inter-action through learning and activities, recognize and understand other cultures, find problems through mutual understanding and critical thinking, and fosters cooperation and creative problem solving.　As a result of analyzing the cultural elements surveyed, <B2. Products(with substance)> in the analysis framework was the most common, followed by <C. Practices>. In this way, students, regardless of whether they majored in Japanese or not, were highly interested in products and practices as external cultural elements. However, it does not mean incorporating all the cultural elements that the learners desire into a class is proper. There are variables such as the environment and purpose of learning the target language, goals, interests, Japanese level, motivation to sustain learning, communication effectiveness, time constraints, and whether or not the learner is a Japanese major. It is necessary to incorporate ‘cultural elements’ with these limitations in mind.

This paper analyses the foreign language curriculum of general high schools in China. The Chinese educational authority announced an experimental version of its language curriculum in 2003, revised it in 2017, and revised it in 2020. In 2003, the foreign language curriculum included only three foreign languages: English, Japanese, and Russian. German, French, and Spanish were added from the 2017 curriculum. The 2017 curriculum consists of three categories: ‘required’, ‘required optional’, and ‘optional’. The required courses meet the requirements for graduation by all students. Students intending to go to college must complete all required optional courses. The six foreign language curriculums equally set four core competencies: language ability, cultural consciousness, thinking ability, and learning ability. In addition, this paper investigated curriculum structure of the six foreign languages, learning vocabulary, and items included in the appendix, and compared the foreign language curriculum in China and Korea. In conclusion, Korea’s next curriculum suggested that achievement standards and evaluation criteria should be more specific in preparation for the high school credit system, and that achievement standards and evaluation criteria should be described so that the curriculum and college entrance can be linked.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between high school students’ use of vocabulary learning strategies and their motivation. Its main concern is with how the relationship varies between three student groups divided according to their vocabulary achievement. A survey was taken by a total of 275 students enrolled in a high school in Gyeonggi province. 232 students were selected to be studied. The students were divided into three groups - advanced, intermediate, and beginner levels - based on their performance in vocabulary tests. Their responses were analyzed through SPSS to produce both basic descriptive and inferential statistics. The results show the three groups differ regarding which strategies both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation had a significant impact on - these were memory and cognitive strategies for the advanced level group; decision, social, memory and metacognitive strategies for the intermediate level group, and none for the beginner level group. The results also show that the three groups differ regarding which strategies only extrinsic or intrinsic motivation had a significant impact on.

The purpose of this study is to explore inter-grade dividing criteria of the 2015 grade group elementary English textbooks. Elementary English textbooks consist of two grade groups: the 3rd and 4th grade group and the 5th and 6th grade group. L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA) is utilized to investigate the dividing criteria of the communicative functions implemented in these textbooks. Subjects of the analysis were the listening dialogues for their structural sequencing of 3rd to 4th graders and 5th to 6th graders separately within their own grade groups. Data were processed and analyzed using SPSS 25.0 and independent sample t tests for inter-grade textbooks for 14 L2SCA statistical indices. The findings are: 6 indices out of the 14 L2SCA statistical indices turn out to be critical for dividing the 2015 grade group elementary English textbooks. The 6 indices are mean clause length, mean sentence length, mean t-unit length, mean complex noun phrasal number per phrase and per t-unit and mean number of verb phrases per t-unit. Based on the findings, it is suggested that a standardized criteria derived from these 6 indices can be provided as an inter-grade dividing criteria of the 2015 grade group elementary English textbooks.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of using films on students’ reading comprehension and attitude toward their English study in the context of a college English class. Specifically, it attempted to examine how a film-based English reading class affected students’ reading comprehension and attitudes toward their study, and how they recognized the film-based English reading class. Thirty-one college students were asked to take pre- and post-tests in English reading, and to respond pre- and post-questionnaires regarding their affective domain, and a focus group of four students was voluntarily interviewed with one of two researchers. Quantitatively, a paired t-test was employed to compare the statistical means from those two samples, and qualitatively, the framework developed by Miles and Huberman (1994) was adopted to describe the major phases of data analysis. The results of data analysis indicated that 1) Using films in the college English reading was helpful for students to comprehend the given text, and to understand other cultures; 2) Also this film-based reading class optimally contributed to the affective domain such as students’ attitudes, interests, and confidence levels. Based on these results, pedagogical implications for effective English reading classes were suggested.

This paper explores initiators of humor and the differing characteristics of humor these initiators use in elementary-level English classrooms in Korea. Forty-nine videotaped ordinary classes and interviews with four teachers were investigated. Teachers tended to make learners the subjects of humor, with this type of humor attracting students to participate in learning. Furthermore, teachers encouraged learners to pay more attention to the form of English language features by humorously revealing mispronunciations or expressions that learners could easily make mistakes with. Additionally, among learners, the primary users of humor were middle- to lower-level students. Teachers needed to build a safe environment for English underachievers who unintentionally made humorous mistakes so that they would not be mocked. Also, certain boys intentionally tried humor to get attention. It is noteworthy that teachers and learners jointly constructed humor by supporting each other. This conjoint humor reaffirms the importance of teachers’ reactions and attitudes towards pupils. By listening attentively and accepting learners’ remarks, teachers could make humorous, meaningful interactions. The current paper projects some pedagogical implications concerning how to use or deal with humor for foreign language teachers.

This study investigated intra-learner variation in the effects of implicit and explicit focus on form (FonF) on second language (L2) acquisition of the English passive, an interface construction. The study employed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design, with five treatment sessions between the pretest and posttests. Implicit FonF was operationalized as textual enhancement (TE), and explicit FonF as consciousness-raising (C-R). Five different outcome measures were utilized to examine the respective treatment effects on the form, meaning, and function of the passive. Data were collected with four Korean high school students, two engaging in TE and the other two in C-R, whose developmental routes through the experiment were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results of the analysis showed that implicit and explicit FonF led to differential variation within each learner, not only across the outcome measures but also over time, yet were suggestive of a potential benefits to each for the different domains encompassed in the passive. These results are further discussed in relation to the learners’ proficiency levels and the types of errors they produced.

This study examines learner perceptions into the use of Classwide Peer Tutoring (CPT) as an approach to conduct a mechanical exercise (ME). This research analyzed learner preferences between CPT and other methods of conducting MEs (i.e., oral MEs and written MEs), examined learner perceptions of CPT’s learning effectiveness, and also inquired into student perceptions of CPT’s peer corrective feedback (CF) approach. Forty-six Korean university students participated in this study by completing a survey after experiencing CPT, oral MEs, and written MEs over the course of nine lessons. The data were analyzed through chi-squared, goodness-of-fit tests and descriptive statistics. The results indicated the participants preferred CPT and perceived CPT as more interesting and motivating than the other ME methods. The results also indicated the participants perceived CPT to be more effective than alternative ME approaches. Lastly, the participants had positive perceptions of CPT’s peer CF approach and believed CPT’s peer CF approach was more effective than the CF approach in oral MEs.

This study investigated how Korean high school students use English connectives in argumentative writing. The participants were 71 high school second year students. Analysis of data focused on three aspects of connective use: 1) the frequency and kinds of connectives used, 2) commonly used words in each category of connectives, and 3) frequently used positions of connectives. Considering the possible effect of topical knowledge and general English ability, the analysis included the comparison between two topic groups and between two language ability groups. The results showed there was a high similarity between different topic groups and ability groups in the use of connectives, but a significant difference was also found in some limited features. Based on the results, the study concludes that Korean high school students, regardless of the writing topic and language ability, share common features in the use of English connectives. Some suggestions are made for further research and writing instruction.

The purpose of this study is to examine phonetically if the spelling errors produced by foreign Korean learners are related to learners’ pronunciation by analyzing the pronunciation of plain, tense, and aspiration sounds of foreign Korean learners using a Praat. A statistical analysis was performed on the listening, reading, and writing data produced by 18 foreign university students at the beginner level. The results are summarized as follows. First, foreign Korean learners accounted for the majority of errors in plain and aspiration sound among initial obstruent words. This can be interpreted as an extremely strong or very weak pronunciation of the word, because learners do not properly recognize the intensity of range in plain sounds. Second, the more accurate the learner’s perception was, the more accurate production can be made. Statistically, it was found that the production rate increased by 0.178 each time the perception rate increased by 1. Therefore, the correlation between perception and production is established. Third, the relationship between pronunciation and spelling is a relationship that increases by 0.652 each time the pronunciation increases by 1. It can be explained that there is a possibility that the learner may often write words as they pronounce them.

In the current elementary Chinese education, the implementation of the perspective of multi-cultural education has great significance since it can positively bring the multi-cultural characteristics of Korean society into class and can develop students’ competence for cosmopolitans living in the age of multi-culturalism. Against this backdrop, this study aims to seek the directions of the development of elementary Chinese textbooks needed for the integrated operation of elementary Chinese education and multi-cultural education. As a baseline study for the ultimate goal, elementary Chinese textbooks currently used at schools were analyzed for evaluation. Then, the results of the analysis were used to propose the directions of the development of textbooks on multi-cultural education in the following areas: the purpose of the textbooks, the presentation of contents, and learning activities. It is expected that, from this study, there will be active discussions on Chinese education, which will not only develop students’ linguistic competence of Chinese but also cultivate the multi-cultural competence at the elementary school in the future.

The study investigates the effects of corpus-based formulaic sequences learning on developing learners’ writing skills and attitudes. For this purpose, fifty-four high school students participated in the study and were divided into two groups. The experimental group learned formulaic sequences with the corpus-based method, while the control group learned the target items through the definition-centered method. The results of the study showed that no significant difference in writing ability was found between corpus-based formulaic sequences learning and traditional formulaic sequences learning. The corpus-based formulaic sequences learning showed a greater effect on improving grammatical accuracy of writing. The traditional formulaic sequences learning was effective in the acquisition of productive knowledge of formulaic sequences. The results of the survey questionnaire showed that the students showed a positive attitude toward corpus-based formulaic sequences learning, which may mean corpus-based learning can play an important role in increasing students’ motivation. These results may suggest that various corpus-based activities for EFL class need to be developed.