This study investigated if the difficulty of instructional classroom English in primary teacher-guidebooks of English is adequately manipulated by learner-proficiency. Corpora of classroom English were compiled from 20 guidebooks from five publishers, approved following the 2015 Revised National Curriculum of Korea. Extracted materials from grades three and four were compared with those of grades five and six to observe variations in the difficulty. Coh-Metrix, a software application that computes an extensive range of measures on cohesion and language, was used for analyses. With evidence-based assessments on (psycho)linguistic features and patterns of classroom English, we report results both congruent and incongruent with the prospect that the difficulty should increase as learners become more proficient. Overall, although partial difficulty manipulations between the two levels were noted, inconsistent results and invariances were also observed, disclosing much room for improvement of classroom English in the guidebooks. Some implications toward teacher-guidebook development, particularly in its classroom English, are suggested

This study examined a timed cloze test for evaluating English proficiency in second language (L2) experimental research. Forty-five Korean college students were randomly assigned to either a timed or untimed condition. In the timed condition, the participants read the sentences of the text one phrase at a time, using the self-paced, cumulative, moving-window reading paradigm, and their reading time (RT) and accuracy were measured. In an untimed condition, the participants carried out a typical pencil-and-paper cloze test. Linear mixed-effect models were used to analyze the data. Although the accuracy data did not indicate any significant results, the RT data showed that the participants responded faster when they selected accurate answers and they answered function words rather than content words; also, as the participants’ TOEIC scores increased, a marginally significant RT difference was observed. A significant correlation was also found between the cloze test and high TOEIC scores in the timed condition. The results showed that the timed cloze test used in the study can provide useful data for L2 experimental research in measuring L2 proficiency.

The purpose of this study is to examine cohesive devices in English writing textbooks and Korean college students’ writings through text and corpus analyses. An analysis of three writing textbooks used in one college English program in Seoul showed that the textbooks did not cover a full range of cohesive devices; instead, they focused on sentence transitions and conjunctions, which L2 writers often overuse or misuse. Other cohesive devices such as demonstratives and lexical cohesive devices such as synonyms, paraphrasing, or collocations, however, were rarely covered. To understand how Korean college students actually use cohesive devices in writing, this study also analyzed the frequencies of sentence transitions and demonstratives in learner and native speaker corpora. The results revealed L2 learners’ tendency to overuse sentence transitions and demonstrative pronouns compared to native speakers. However, the results also showed that as proficiency increases, learners tend to use fewer sentence transitions.

This study examined the effects of learners’ prior knowledge of a linguistic form on the noticing function of output (Swain, 1995), which might mediate second language (L2) production and learning. Based on the degree of prior knowledge of the target form, the participants were divided into four levels. The noticing scores (measured by underlining in the subsequent input) showed that Level 2 participants—who had partial knowledge of the target form—noticed more target forms than the other levels and the comparison group. The participants in the experimental group produced more target forms on the second output activity than on the first output activity. However, learners’ increased noticing did not lead to immediate increased improvement of production and learning. Some prior knowledge of the target form was able to mediate noticing of the form, but one-time noticing might not be enough for promoting improvement of production and learning of the target form.

This paper aims to investigate Korean advanced L2 English learners’ strategies for ellipsis resolution during sentence processing. Ellipsis resolution is known to involve several stages of information processing from the initial step of detecting an ellipsis-licensing element by the parser to the final stage of integrating the ellipsis site with the information retrieved from the antecedent of the ellipsis site. In examining these steps, we have manipulated three factors: (i) TP vs. VP-ellipsis; (ii) two types of discourse coherence relations (resemblance(-contrast) vs. cause-effect relations); (iii) voice match vs. mismatch. We found through the ERP recordings that voice mismatch in TP ellipsis elicited N400, followed by P600, irrespective of discourse coherence relations. In contrast, voice mismatch in VP-ellipsis registered N400 only in resemblance(-contrast) relation, but not in cause-effect relation. These findings lead us to conclude that Korean advanced L2 learners of English seem to undergo the full sequence of processing stages required for ellipsis resolution.