The present study examines Korean high school English teachers’ and university students’ perceptions about the criterion-referenced assessment of English in CSAT. A total of 400 participants (149 teachers and 251 students) answered an online questionnaire. Teachers showed more positive attitudes than students in their perceptions about the reduction of excessive competition among students, more communicative English classes, and the use of Korean and mathematics scores of the CSAT for the admission materials. Students, on the other hand, were more positive than teachers in their perceptions about the effects of the criterion-referenced assessment of English in CSAT on the reduction of private education and more high scorers in the CSAT. Regarding the alternatives to current criterion-referenced assessments of English in CSAT, teachers seem to emphasize the development of new question types for a valid criterion-referenced assessment system while students seem to focus on improving the communication skills through the English test in CSAT, not on the validity of the criterion-referenced assessment.

This paper investigates Korean-Chinese bilingual speakers’ processing of Korean plural marker -tul. It employed masked priming experiments with a word judgment task for Korean-Chinese speakers from Yanbian, China. The masked priming experiments compared the subjects’ response time in three different prime-target pairs: identical condition, unrelated condition, and test condition. The data of the experiments was analyzed in two different ways: subject analyses and item analyses. The subject analyses of the study showed partial priming effects and the item analyses full priming effects. These findings indicate that Chinese-Korean bilinguals seem to be sensitive to morphological structure of a morphologically complex words in Korean and less dependent on the lexical storage of the full form, as is usually found in L2 learners’ morphological processing.

This paper reports results from two types of priming experiments (i.e., masked and cross-modal priming experiments) which compare Chinese L2 learners’ morphological processing of a Korean verbal suffix -ko with adult native speakers of Korean. L1/L2 differences were found in both the masked and cross-modal priming experiments: Full priming effects were found in the masked priming experiment and partial priming effects in the cross-modal priming experiment in L1, while weak or no priming effects were found in both types of priming experiments of L2. These findings indicate that L2 learners of Korean are less sensitive to morphological structure than native speakers and dependent on the lexical storage of the full form. This study also provided evidence for the non-difference between the masked priming and the cross-modal priming experiments both in L1 and L2.

This study is a follow-up of Hwang's (2007) empirical study, which investigated the role of awareness in Korean high school students' subsequent learning of the English passive. Hwang (2007) found the positive relationship between awareness and subsequent processing of the target structure and claimed the crucial role of awareness in successful second language learning. The present study explores whether the effects of awareness retain six months after the first post-exposure task of Hwang (2007), which was performed one day after the instruction. The results of the present study revealed the retention of the effects of awareness in the written production task as well as in the multiple-choice recognition task. However, no significant differences were found between the passive group, who were consciously aware of the target structure through a reading text and brief explanation about the English passive, and the preposition group whose attention could be implicitly drawn to the target structure through the reading text only. The results cannot fully support Schmidt's noticing hypothesis and can also be interpreted as providing evidence for the dissociation claim that L2 learning can take place implicitly without conscious awareness.

This paper investigates Korean EFL learners’ perceived phonetic dissimilarity of English liquids /l/ and /r/ to test the Korean learners’ relative acquisition difficulty of the two English liquids. Contrary to the prediction of the contrastive analysis hypothesis, a hypothesis from Flege’s (1995) Speech Learning Model asserts that the greater the perceived phonetic dissimilarity between an L2 speech sound and the closest L1 sound, the more likely learners will be to discern the difference between the L1 and L2 sounds. Fifteen Korean EFL learners were asked to judge how well English /l/ and /r/ in various phonological environments represent the Korean liquid, using a scale ranging from 0 (“not like”) to 6 (“exactly the same”). The results of the judgment task showed that Korean L2 learners perceived English /l/ to be more similar to Korean /l/ than English /r/ in syllable-initial, consonant cluster, and intervocalic positions, but not in syllable-final position. The results of the present study are expected to provide a basis for future research which investigates Korean learners’ perception and production of English /l/ and /r/.

This study compares the effects of three different focus-on-form techniques in order to find out the best way of teaching English present perfect to Korean EFL learners. 120 university students were divided into three different groups depending on the degree of explicitness of instruction: the input flooding group, the input enhancement group, and the rule explanation group. The effects of each type of focus-on-form instruction were measured through the students' learning of the target structure and the comprehension of given reading texts. The results of the experiment show that in the learning of the target structure the rule explanation group was significantly better than the other two groups, and the implicit focus-on-form technique, input enhancement, was more effective than input flooding. The present study also revealed that no one type of focus-on-form technique was more effective than any other types in the comprehension of the reading texts.