This study compared aural and written modes of presentation for the two item types, to explore the effects of question/option presentation mode and item type on EFL learners’ listening comprehension performance and their perception. One hundred and fifteen Korean college students who were divided into three different proficiency groups participated in the study. The participants took a listening test which consisted of dialogue-completion and Q&A multiple-choice items in the aural and written modes, followed by a survey on their perceptions, and a stimulated recall interview. The results showed that the least proficient group was more critically affected by the mode than the other two groups. The least proficient group performed significantly better in the written mode than in the aural mode, while they received similar scores on the two item types. The major factors that caused the discrepancy among the groups were memory capacity in the aural mode and reading ability in the written mode. The implications and suggestions on listening test development are discussed.

This study examined the use of conjunctions in Korean high school EFL learners’ writings in two discourse modes–description and argument. A corpus of seventy-six descriptive essays and eighty argumentative essays was developed, in which the essays were rated based on their cohesiveness and divided into three groups by their grades. Conjunctions were analyzed based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) framework: additive, adversative, causal, and temporal conjunctions. The results revealed different trends of using conjunctions in the two different discourse modes. The descriptive writings with high scores on cohesion tend to exhibit more conjunctions when compared to lower-quality writings, and the argumentative writings with high scores showed fewer conjunctions. The high-quality writings in descriptive mode showed highly frequent uses of additives and adversatives, while those in argumentative mode displayed a lower frequency of additives and a more frequent use of adversative however. Small numbers of causal and temporal conjunctions were used in both discourse modes, and they were particularly limited in descriptive writings regardless of the cohesiveness of writings. This implies that more explicit instructions on causal and temporal conjunctions for each mode are needed in the writing classes. In addition, the scores on cohesion were significantly lower for the descriptive essays than for the argumentative essays, and a much narrower range of conjunctions was employed in descriptive writing. These results suggest a more balanced focus on various discourse modes of writing and the introduction of conjunctions that are appropriate for each mode, since the ability to use conjunctions in one mode does not seem to be automatically transferred to another mode in high school EFL learners’ writings.