The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between elementary school students’ self-confidence in English as a foreign language and their assessment of English teaching taught by native speaker English teachers. A total of 126 elementary school students were asked on a 5-point Likert scale instrument to assess their native English teachers in terms of their teaching ability, provision of opportunity to use English, classroom management, and language assessment ability. In addition, the subjects were asked to rate how much they were confident with their English. All of the responses were submitted to the SPSS 22 version for statistical analyses. Firstly, the subjects were divided into 3 groups based on how much they felt confident with their English. Secondly, a MANOVA was run to investigate any group differences in how they perceive their native speaker teachers’ teaching ability, provision of opportunity, and language assessment ability. The results indicated that language confidence was indeed an important variable not only in subjects’ learning English but also how they perceived their English learning experience as a whole. Pedagogical implications for improving elementary school children were also discussed.

Youngcheol Kim and Jaewoo Shim. 2017. Discriminant Analysis of Satisfaction Levels with Native Speaker Instructors Held by Elementary School Pre-service Teachers of English. Studies in Modern Grammar 96, 235-251. The current study investigated the levels of satisfaction with native speaker teachers of English that were perceived by a group of elementary school pre-service teachers of English in a teachers college. 79 subjects responded to a Likert-type questionnaire with 15 items aimed to assess their satisfaction with their current and former native speaker teachers on their campus. The questionnaire measured the four aspects of teaching: the ability to teach, the ability to offer learning opportunities, the ability to manage and create friendly classroom climate, and the ability to assess their performance. The discriminant analysis was used to identify aspects that separated satisfied from unsatisfied groups of students. The results of the discriminant analysis showed that two independent variables (i.e., the native speaker teachers’ ability to offer learning opportunities and their ability to teach) were statistically significant variables in separating the two groups. These findings indicated that native speaker teachers of English need to make efforts to design lessons that may prompt active student participation, while keeping high levels of teaching ability congruent with students’ expectations.

This study investigated the grammar learning strategies of high school students and any effect of their usage of those strategies on grammar test scores. To understand different types of grammar learning strategies, the 148 students were asked to indicate their extent to which they use as to 16 statements concerning grammar learning. Their responses to the 16 Likert type scale instrument were factor analyze and the results identified four distinct dimensions of strategies: ‘reflecting on the pre-existing knowledge', 'asking for assistance', 'applying knowledge', and 'taking autonomous actions'. After the identification of the four types of strategies, their strategy scores were related to subjects' grammar test scores by the application of logistic regression analysis. The multi-variate statistics results indicated that students with lower scores on the grammar test actually used higher frequency of reflecting strategy than those subjects with higher scores on the test, which was contrary to researchers' expectations. The unexpected result was interpreted in terms of the dimension of declarative knowledge of grammar with which subjects whose grammatical competence has not established tend to be more exploratory in employing the strategy than those students who have already acquired those declarative grammar skills. With the clear item loading onto each factor, the instrument may be used for assessing high school students' grammar study strategies, a part of English learning behavior.