In light of the expanding use of technology in education, we attempted to analyze how Korean college students perceived the use of Machine Translation (MT) tools in the classroom. Specifically, this study attempted to explore students’ perceptions of their ability to use MT tools and to measure the reliability of the MT-generated output, along with measuring students’ general sense of confidence in English learning. This research analyzed 183 EFL college students’ responses to an online survey, and a one-way ANOVA was used to test for the differences in the averages of three groups. The results of data analysis revealed that 1) Among beginners, intermediate learners, and advanced learners, those self-identifying as advanced had the highest scores on all the factors measured.; 2) There was a significant mean difference in students’ perceptions of the ability to use MT tools, their beliefs regarding MT’s effectiveness as a learning tool, and affective attitudes towards the use of MT tools between beginner and advanced groups. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications for the effective use of MT tools in the Korean EFL classrooms, and suggestions for future research were presented.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the characteristics of Korean college students’ writings, which have been produced without or with the help of machine translation tool in the classroom. Specifically, this research attempted to investigate the linguistic characteristics of the students’ writings, and types of errors identified in the writings. Twelve pieces of writings from three college students were collected for analysis. Two online word analysis programs, Word Counter (2023) and LIWC-22 (2023), were employed for data analysis. The findings of data analysis found out that 1) The students’ drafts consisted of 22.8 sentences including 303.9 words in 3.6 paragraphs on average. 2) In the students’ drafts, ‘unique’ words (46.8%) were included a lot more than ‘difficult’ words (27%), and students tended to write their essay writings in an unfiltered or impromptu way rather than an analytical way regardless of their English language proficiency levels. 3) The highest frequency of errors was seen in grammatical errors (41.7%) followed by lexical errors (31.6%). Based on the research findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions for the effective use of machine translation in English writing classes were presented.

The purpose of this research is to find out how EFL college learners utilized machine translation while writing their presentation scripts. Specifically, it attempted to examine the characteristics of the English translation outputs by MT and students’ self-edited drafts, and their perceptions toward the use of MT in English writing classes. Six college students were asked to submit one Korean draft, two machine translation drafts, and one self-edited draft, and two in-depth interviews were conducted with each of the participants during the course of the semester. Grammarly (2022), a free online grammar and spelling checker, was used to examine the characteristics of the collected writings, and Miles and Huberman’s (1994) three-step analytic method was employed to analyze the data from the in-depth interviews. The results of data analysis revealed that 1) there were more lexical errors than grammatical errors, and the number of the errors did not show a big difference between the different drafts; 2) Also, students viewed the use of MT in the English writing classes positively but found it difficult to properly use. Based on the research findings, pedagogical implications for the effective use of MT in English writing classes were suggested.