The purpose of this study is to investigate how important Korean high school students perceive English word stress to be, how familiar they are with word stress, and how well they pronounce the reduced vowel /ə/. Sixty high school students in Seoul participated in a survey study that investigated their perception of the importance of word stress in English. They were then asked to mark the stress on each of the 44 words selected from the basic vocabulary list compiled by the Korean Ministry of Education and to pronounce each word twice. The results of the survey revealed that a vast majority of the students (50 out of 60, 80%) do not pay attention to the stress and pronunciation of words when they study new vocabulary and that they memorize only the spelling and meaning of new words. As a result, many of them could not identify the stressed syllables in many of the 44 words, even when they knew their meaning. As for their pronunciation of the reduced vowel /ə/, the students on average were able to pronounce /ə/ correctly in only 23 words, although they stressed the correct syllable in 28 words. All these results highlight the necessity of teaching Korean students explicitly the importance of word stress in English and the correct pronunciation of the reduced vowel /ə/ in order to help them improve their intelligibility.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the errors concerning V-ing forms in Korean college freshmen’s English essays in order to provide some guidelines for teaching the forms effectively. The data for this study were retrieved from a learner corpus consisting of 815 essays written by Korean college freshmen. A total of 3,843 words were found in the form of V-ing, which were categorized according to their roles as follows: (a) present participles (1,235 tokens), (b) gerunds (2,591 tokens), and (c) unclear cases (17 tokens). Of the 3,843 forms of V-ing, a total of 292 tokens were classified as erroneous, 137 of which were participle-related errors and 138 gerundrelated errors. The most frequently occurring errors under the categories of present participles and gerunds were the use of a present particle without a main verb (64.2%) (e.g. I *looking for the meaning of the building’s name) and to-infinitive related errors (66.7%) (e.g. Therefore, we try to *changing our college’s image), respectively. Pedagogical suggestions based on the findings of the study are also provided at the end.

In order to ascertain the extent to which Korean college students are familiar with the proper use of the English comma, this study examined all the instances of the comma used in a learner corpus consisting of 787 compositions written by Korean college students. All in all, 5,869 tokens of comma errors were identified and subsequently grouped into five categories of errors: (a) omission, (b) addition, (c) wrong substitution, (d) wrong position, and (e) others. A careful examination of these five types of comma errors revealed that the number of tokens in omission was the highest among the five categories, accounting for over half of all the comma errors, and that the students who received higher scores on their essays were just as likely to make comma errors as those who scored lower, a fact which suggests that students with a higher procifiency of English also need instruction on using the comma properly. These results lead to the conclusion that most Korean students are not familiar with contextual uses of the comma and that teaching the comma should be incorporated into English education both at the secondary and at the tertiary level.

This study aims to investigate the errors of prepositional verbs in Korean university students' essays and alert teachers to the necessity of a more systematic instruction of prepositional verbs. Prepositional-verb errors found in the learner corpus of essays written by 416 Korean university students were classified into five categories: (a) preposition omission, (b) wrong prepositions, (c) preposition addition, (d) misordering, and (e) others. Of the 1317 tokens of prepositional verbs retrieved from the corpus, 448 were found to be used erroneously, over half of which were instances of preposition omission. No tokens of misordering errors were found (e.g., *to go school / *go school to). A careful analysis of these errors also revealed the following. First, students were not able to discern the difference between a verb used transitively and the same verb used as a prepositional verb (e.g., believe and believe in). Second, the inability to distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive ones also resulted in a considerable number of errors in preposition omission (e.g., *listen music) and preposition addition (e.g., *enter in university). Third, using wrong prepositions (e.g., *worried at me) was also a rather common occurrence, accounting for 18% of the all the errors related to prepositional verbs.

In English, some occupations are used as titles or address terms, while others are not. For example, doctor is a title and address term, but lawyer and teacher are not. In Korean, however, it is the other way around. This discrepancy among various occupations shows that there exist both linguistic and nonlinguistic conditions which are more than just "status" of the individual or the occupation concerned. According to Bell (1988), it is the absence of the definite article that endorses the descriptive noun phrase to become a title, a process which is achieved by pre-posing the descriptive noun phrase, e.g. linguist Chomsky. In Korean, it is the post-posing of the descriptive noun phrase that achieves the same result, e.g. Gim Jakka (Kim Writer). 105 native speakers of Korean were asked to judge whether or not 30 different occupations sound natural when they are used as titles or address terms. At least three conditioning factors were found to be necessary for higher acceptability: (1) high status of the occupation, including professionality, (2) a discourse context which is high in density in terms of social network, and (3) the occupation name with fewer than three syllables which cannot be abbreviated.