The purpose of this study was to analyze six English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ trajectories of discriminating near-synonyms in a data-driven learning task. Since the learners find it considerably difficult to learn subtle meaning differences of near-synonyms, corpuscorpuscorpuscorpuscorpuscorpus-based data-driven learning may provide an opportunity for them to tackle their difficulties. The study materials guided the learners to identify the differences between the four pairs of near-synonyms, categorize the concordance lines based on their findings, and generalize the findings. The six participants had notably different trajectories of discriminating near-synonyms. The qualitative analysis of the trajectories showed a tendency that the intermediate learners focused on the meanings and found the correct answer without knowing the core meaning, and the advanced learners moved further to attend to structural differences and sometimes tested their previous knowledge on the concordance data. This study implies the need for careful guidance, collaborative group works, and strategy teaching in data-driven learning tasks.

The study discussed advanced-level Korean high school EFL learners’ demotivation and remotivation strategies in English learning. Demotivation refers to specific external forces that reduce or harm motivation; remotivation is the process of recovering the reduced motivation. Although both are common in L2 learning, only a few studies address this issue. Using the survey data of 130 participants, the study identified eight demotivating factors through factor analysis. The first factor, negative attitude toward English, indicates that even high school students felt demotivated because of the sheer difficulty of studying English. Descriptive statistics revealed that a negative attitude toward the English-speaking community was not a strong demotivator, which indicated that students possessed Machiavellian motivation. Correlation and regression analysis suggested that no demotivator had a significant negative relationship with English scores; rather, the ways students perceived the demotivators were more important. Eight remotivation strategies were identified; among those, “Keep thinking about the social importance of English” was the most often mentioned one. These results suggested the need for further qualitative, systemic research on remotivators and for training programs for practicing remotivation strategies.