The English dative alternation, which involves an alternation between the double object construction (DC) and the adpositional construction (AC), has been known to be one of the most problematic areas for L2 learners. This paper investigates the factors influencing the Korean English as a foreign language learners’ choices between the two constructions. The Korean section of the TOEFL11 corpus was used and sentences with dative constructions were extracted from the corpus. Nine factors were then encoded and analyzed with a generalized linear mixed-effect model. From the analysis, the following facts were observed: (1) Korean EFL learners’ choice between the DC and the AC was influenced by five factors: animacy of theme, definiteness of theme, pronominality of recipient, length difference between theme and recipient, and individual verbs; (2) despite some similarities in choice of alternation between Korean EFL learners and ENL speakers, the two groups also exhibited differences, and (3) these differences originated from the different effects of these factors.

This study investigates the interactions between Korean EFL teachers’ beliefs about English language education, their teaching practices, and their perceptions of the reform initiated by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (MEST). It highlights the variable of teaching level. Ninety-eight elementary school (ET), 96 middle school (MT), and 94 high school teachers (HT) were surveyed. The findings indicate that: (1) the participants’ beliefs were largely based on the communication-oriented approach (COA), although there was a group difference with the ETs believing it most strongly, (2) the HTs’ COA-oriented beliefs did not match their teaching practices, which were largely based on the grammar-focused, reading-based approach, and (3) the majority of the participants suggested that their low English proficiencies and large class sizes were constraints on their attempts to implement the reform. In addition, the HTs listed the College Scholastic Ability Test as a constraint. These findings are believed to be symptomatic of a transition stage through which English language education has been passing in Korea. The study also interprets the findings as a result of EFL teachers’ strategic adjustments in the face of the schism between the demands of the MEST-initiated reform and the realities of English language education.

This paper addresses pedagogical implications of contrastive rhetoric by focusing on recent trends in the field of contrastive rhetoric. The paper first addresses traditional contrastive rhetoric and highlights major issues along the way. It then focuses on recent diversification of and challenges to traditional contrastive rhetoric. For this purpose, the paper takes a close look at a) contrastive rhetoric's recent focus on rhetorical similarities rather than differences, b) its examination of ESL/EFL learners' perspectives, c) the introduction of critical contrastive rhetoric, and d) the most recent challenges based on the English-as-an-international-lingua-franca perspective. The paper concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications of such diversification efforts and challenges. The discussion covers contrastive rhetoric's contribution to the increased awareness of ethnocentrism underlying traditional contrastive rhetoric, the need to study about actual impact of teaching rhetorical differences and/or similarities, and the necessity of investigating ESL/EFL learners’ beliefs about writing in English, which is believed to have a filtering effect on ESL/EFL learners' acceptance of contrastive rhetorical information.

The twentieth-century history of second language (L2) education has been characterized by a search for more effective ways of L2 education. The search has led to various approaches, and perceptions of and attitudes toward the role and effectiveness of instruction in L2 education has been affected by these approaches. The role and effectiveness of instruction has important pedagogical implications. This study attempts to review, analyze, and synthesize previous studies on the role and effectiveness of L2 grammar instruction. The study starts by presenting a brief overview of major issues in L2 instruction research. It then looks into studies that investigate the effects of various instructional types and finds that their findings and conclusions are conflicting, leaving an impression that the effectiveness of grammar instruction is inconclusive at best. The study ends with a discussion of “problems” that the reviewed studies reveal.