The present study aimed to analyze the developmental trajectories of English achievement and exposure time through private education, utilizing univariate and multivariate latent growth curve analysis. This study used a subset of the Gyeonggi Education Panel Study data from 2012 to 2017. The results indicated consistent disparities in the growth of English achievement, depending on the student’s proficiency levels at the starting point. In particular, the early exposure to private tutoring was significantly and closely related to the initial status and the growth trajectory of English achievement. When the sample was classified by urbanicity, the findings suggested that the gap in English achievement was likely to increase over time across the two regions, with a stronger correlation with private tutoring found in urban areas. These results underscore the need for educational intervention for students in less advantageous conditions, and they provide valuable pedagogical implications for teaching English in the Korean EFL context.

This study examines the effects of text length and question type on Korean EFL readers’ reading comprehension of the fill-in-the-blank items in Korean CSAT. A total of 100 Korean EFL college students participated in the study. After divided into three different proficiency groups, the participants took a reading comprehension test which consisted of 4 reading passages (2 short and 2 long) from the Korean CSAT, followed by multiple-choice fill-in-the-blank questions and open-ended inference questions. The longer version of the passages was made from its originally restored version in which one or two paragraphs were added. The results showed that the college students performed better on the long passages than the short ones. In addition, the college students’ reading comprehension test performance was affected differently depending on the type of questions. The findings of the study provided implications on how to select and construct reading passages for high-stake nationwide examinations, such as the Korean CSAT.

The purpose of the present study is to analyze needs of graduate students for English education for their academic study. Online survey was administered to all the graduate students in a university located in Seoul, Korea, and a total of 1,241 students participated in this study. The participants varied in majors including humanities and social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, medicine, and so forth. Crosstab analyses were performed in order to analyze the survey data, followed by subordinate analyses by the participants’ majors. Results indicated that most students perceived the great importance of English for their study, and ‘listening’ and ‘speaking’ were found to be the most difficult areas when students take English-medium graduate courses. In addition, although the frequency of scholarly activities varied by majors, most of the students expressed difficulties in writing research papers and making presentations. Based on the results, the present study suggests that English education programs be expanded and opened in order to meet the different needs by the students’ academic majors.