Previous studies on English spelling have investigated the types of spelling errors and their frequencies, and studies on why learners made those errors have been called for. This study aimed to identify factors leading to errors in the English-spelling of Korean elementary school students. The factors were investigated by using the following methods: A total of 130 students from O Elementary School were given three types of word-writing tasks: dictation of single words, dictation of short sentences, and writing words as many as the students can based on pictures depicting familiar scenes. The errors in their writing samples were classified into five types. The students were interviewed about why they made those errors. The results showed that the errors were influenced by the factors: the students’ first language, background knowledge, pronunciation, and morphological reasons. The results suggest that if teachers understood these factors, they would be able to explore better teaching methods for reducing errors in English spelling, and that future research could apply these factors for further investigations.

This study asked whether two picture prompts, one depicting a critical incidence, called ‘losing a cellphone’ and the other without a critical incidence, namely ‘using a cellphone’ made a difference to the content of story writing. The study also investigated which picture students preferred, one with or without a critical incidence. High school students (N = 101) participated in a story writing task where one of the two prompts was assigned to each student. A survey for preference was implemented to 185 high school students. The results show that when stories were composed under time constraint, whether the critical incident was present or absent was not a significant factor in the writers’ creation of better or worse content in writing. However, the critical incidence in the picture might be considered an attractive tool for story writing, promoting writers’ positive attitude to the task.

This study investigated spelling errors in English stories written by 206 students in an elementary school implementing Korean/English immersion education. Errors were analyzed using crosstab and MANCOVA. Findings are as follows. Spelling errors occurred in 4 categories in order from the most frequent to the least: substitution, omission, addition, and transposition. The error occurrences differed depending on grade level changes: lower grades (Grades 1-3) vs. higher grades (Grades 4-6). The students in both grade levels made more errors in substitution and omission: these error types were significantly decreased as they progressed to the higher grade levels. Errors in addition and transposition showed much fewer occurrences for both grade levels, and these errors did not show a significant decrease because of their rarer occurrences. Overall, the students’ spelling ability increased remarkably as they progressed in grade levels in the immersion environment.

Mijin Kang and Jungok Bae. 2017. Errors in Subject-Verb Agreement: The Case of Immersion-Based EFL Elementary School Students. Studies in Modern Grammar 95, 81-101. The present study investigates several syntactic structures in which subject-verb agreement errors occur. The study analyzed free writing samples written by 104 elementary school students enrolled in a partial English immersion school. In the writing samples, errors in the subject-verb agreement were found in the following categories: (a) subject + verb; (b) coordinated subjects + verb; (c) subject + coordinated verbs; and (d) expletive ‘there’ + ‘be’ verb. Errors in the ‘subject + verb’ structure with no modifying phrases in-between were the most prominent. The second most frequent errors were found in the ‘subject + coordinated verbs’ structure. The results provide useful implications for English teachers dealing with the persistent errors in the subject-verb agreement.

The English word that occurs in a variety of usages, the complexity of which tends to confuse EFL students. This study investigated what might be the hierarchy of difficulty among eleven usages of that. The usages were initially categorized into 11 different functions. To test the knowledge about these functions, 66 items were created with six questions per usage and given to 487 Korean high schools students. Mean scores calculated for each usage were taken as indicators of difficulty, and thus an initial hierarchy of difficulty with 11 levels was established. By means of repeated measures ANOVA, sets of means with no significant difference were merged into single categories of difficulty. This procedure resulted in four remaining categories in order from easiest to most difficult for students to learn. They were: (A) complementizer of a subject clause, demonstrative pronoun; (B) complementizer of an object clause, relative adverb, objective relative pronoun, complementizer of an appositive clause, subjective relative pronoun; (C) adverbial conjunction, demonstrative determiner; and (D) adverb. Cross-validation demonstrated that the same order of hierarchy was maintained for both schools and genders. An exception was found for a group with lower English proficiency where only the usages in category A were easier while those in the other categories were equally difficult. These findings may help EFL teachers and textbooks authors predict the relative difficulty that students might experience in processing and acquiring usages of that.