The study investigated whether Korean EFL students' vocabulary used in reading-based writing differed according to writing topic and their reading and writing proficiency. College students enrolled in writing courses (n=95) were asked to write argumentative essays in response to two readings on judging people by appearance (JPA) and disclosing personal information of serious criminals (DPI). These students were divided into high and low proficiency writer groups and into high and low proficiency reader groups according to their writing and reading scores respectively. The students' vocabulary used in writing was then analyzed by VocabProfile, which provided four lexical frequency lists: the first 1000 frequent words (K1) including function words (FW) and content words (CW), the second 1000 frequent words (K2), academic word list (AWL), and off the list words (OLW). The results indicated that the topic JPA produced a higher proportion of K1 and content words, whereas DPI generated more K2 and off the list words. None of the vocabulary profiles, however, significantly differed according to the students’ reading proficiency. In contrast, proficient writers were found to use significantly more K1 and function words than their counterparts. With the topic effect further considered, for JPA, proficient writers used more K1 words and function words whereas less proficient writers used more K2 and off the list words. With regard to DPl, proficient writers were found to use more function words than low proficient writers. Findings are discussed in more detail, along with implications.

This study investigates the effects of indirect and direct error feedback on Korean college students’ accuracy improvement in writing and their responses to the feedback they received. The 32 participants of the study were divided into four groups of different error feedback conditions: indirect feedback, indirect feedback along with metalinguistic feedback, direct feedback, and direct feedback along with metalinguistic feedback. Direct feedback was full, explicit error correction, while indirect feedback was coded error correction in which errors were underlined and marked with code. Metalinguistic feedback was marginal explanations about errors. Analysis of error rates in the students’ first and last essay writing did not show statistically significant difference in the accuracy improvement of the four groups. In other words, indirect error feedback was not more effective than direct feedback. However, the gain score in each group showed that indirect feedback and direct feedback were more effective when they were combined with metalinguistic feedback. In particular, the students’ learning diary clearly indicated that the students valued error feedback on their writing and that follow-up feedback was crucial in providing indirect error feedback.