This study deals with the overall meta-cognitive aspects of ATC-Pilot miscommunications pertinent to cognitive human errors based on the previous literature research which it has been focused on the issue of the global aviation English use in regard with aircraft accident and incident. Especially, it addresses the concern over the ICAO aviation English language proficiency evaluation program which will be implemented globally in March, 2008. In addition, It presents the analysis related to the on-going English language proficiency level four test conducted for Korean civil airlines pilots and air traffic controllers.

In the language class combined with "creative drama", one of the approaches in educational theatre, the stories told by a teacher are organically developed into an original drama with several drama techniques. Even though there are some research studies on using creative drama in the ESL context, there are few in the EFL situation. Therefore, this study presents the result of a study investigating how creative drama affects young language learners" English learning in a Korean primary school. An English drama class, at after-school program in Seoul, combined with creative drama had been observed once a week for a semester. Seven first graders in the class were presented with 6 different stories, which contain certain phonemes each and dramatized the stories in a creative way. They were assessed through pre-and post- tests and surveys in terms of their linguistic improvements and affective changes and analyzed quantitatively. In addition, participants were individually analyzed according to their characteristics in linguistic and affective aspects by using field notes from classroom observation and interviews. The results show that participants made progress in linguistic aspects including phonics and vocabulary skills and that their affective factors including language anxiety level had shown a positive development throughout the semester. Moreover, each participant showed particular characteristics respectively in terms of linguistic and affective perspectives.

With restrictions in the target language, taking turns in a timely fashion to participate in class discussions can be a challenging task for L2 learners. In order to understand L2 learners" particular choices and behaviors in taking turns in class discussions, an in-depth investigation of their experiences and views contributed by the learners themselves is called for. This paper pursues a qualitative case study on Korean graduate students" experiences and perceptions of taking turns to participate in class discussions in a content course. Analysis of data from interviews, observations, and documents revealed that Korean students perceived language ability, cultural difference, educational background, context/condition, and personality as responsible for the challenges they faced in taking turns in class discussions in English. The Korean students were also aware of the differences between the native speakers and themselves with respect to the strategies applied to gain turns in discussions noting that the native speakers used certain expressions that eased the turn-takes. Contrary to expectations, the Korean students saw L2 proficiency as just one factor involved in obtaining turns in class discussions and highlighted confidence as a crucial factor for success.

This study reports on an experimental study that investigates Korean EFL college students" acquisition of English verbs (such as break and change) that participate in the transitivity alternation. The experiment was devised specifically to examine how the distinction of the three types of transitivity alternation verbs - unaccusatives, middles, and passives (all with non-agent subject on the surface) - is revealed in the development of learners" interlanguage. A total of 80 college students were divided into two proficiency groups and asked to perform a production task and a grammatical judgment task on the target structures. The overall results show that the learners acquire passives earlier than unaccusatives and middles. The results also reveal that with increased proficiency, the learners perform better on all the target structures regardless of the task type. The results show, however, that even higher proficiency learners are not sensitive to lexico-syntactic properties associated with unaccusatives and middles. Another finding from the results is that the major type of the learners" interlanguage error is overpassivization of unaccusatives and middles, which confirms that Korean EFL learners, like learners with other L1 backgrounds, rely on a universal mechanism of subject―agent and object―patient/theme mapping.

This interview study aims at exploring how two Korean college graduates strive autonomously to manage their English world before, during and after college-graduation. The participants were two very autonomous students out of 34 students the researcher met at a 15-week autonomy-based English Speaking/Writing class at a college in 2003. Two major findings emerged from the interview data collected in April 2005: (1) B"s initial interest in English came from teachers" urgings to get good test scores, but his visit to America and Australia made him more interested in learning communicative English; (2) S"s interest in non-Korean people and countries, inspired by her first English teacher, made her go abroad and practice English very actively in and beyond Korea. The findings shed light on a critical issue concerning the application of the learner autonomy theory with Korean students who learn English in Korean educational contexts: the limit and effectiveness of classroom-English-learning. Pedagogical implications of the findings are added at the end.

Spelling is a complicated skill, which is difficult to acquire even for native language learners. During the early stages of learning to read, children use various orthographic strategies to spell and their spellings show different developmental characteristics. This present study examines Korean elementary school students" English spelling. This is a cross-sectional study: three hundred and fifty seven students" spelling data was collected from 4th, 5th and 6th grade students and analyzed for comparison from the developmental spelling view. The data was analyzed into two categories: accuracy of spelling at each grade and the children"s invented spellings. Results showed that the EFL children"s spellings have developmental features similar to native language learners or ESL learners. The fourth graders omitted vowels and substituted letter names instead of short vowels. As the grades increase, the salient features of spelling were changed; whereas the fourth graders showed low level achievement in CVVC words, the six graders" spelling presented increased achievement in the same category. However, they have different aspects in detail, e.g. Korean learners acquire diphthongs earlier than CVck, which is unusual compared to the native English learners. Finally, a conclusion was drawn from the data and instructional suggestions are provided.

As English has been rapidly spreading to non-Western communities, we have had numerous varieties of English. In the Outer Circle, English gained an official status, which resulted in nonnative varieties of English. In the Expanding Circle, English achieved the status of the first foreign language. With a range of English varieties, educators and administrators have been faced with controversial questions such as: (1) how to define native speakers of English? and (2) which varieties to teach? This qualitative study investigates four Korean EFL teachers’ perception of speakers of English and the issue of target varieties. Using data from semi-structured interviews and personal conversations collected for one academic semester, the researcher found that the participants considered various features when identifying an individual as a native or nonnative speaker of English. They used to consider ethnicity and nationality important in the past, which have been replaced by language precedence, cultural attachment, native speaker’s intuition, and mutual intelligibility. The findings of this study also demonstrate that American English is regarded as the most preferred variety as an educational target in Korean ELT because of the power that its speakers have.

This paper discusses what the basic principle of Korean consonantal assimilation and tensification is and how to teach the two processes to learners. Since some of the Korean phonological changes including these two processes are complicated and cannot easily be seen in other languages, students may face difficulty in learning such processes. It has been claimed that these processes are due to the "principle of economy" in pronunciation. That is, certain consonant clusters or consonantal sequences that are difficult to produce undergo changes in a way to make them easy to pronounce. In this paper I argue against such a claim by adopting the principle of English, which has two different types of consonant clusters, namely "word-initial and word-final clusters". The phonotactic constraints of the word-final clusters in this language, which are opposite to the case of word-initial clusters, have the ascending structure in the consonantal strength between the two consonants. We see that the two consonants in sequence in Korean have almost the same structure. Unlike English, these constraints must be obeyed whether words are simple or complex in Korean. The two consonants that are not kept up to these constraints by the morphological process undergo phonological process. This is the principle of consonantal assimilation and tensification in Korean, and thus, teachers (and also possibly learners) of Korean should recognize the principle to understand the processes correctly.

Gardner’s socio-educational model of second language acquisition has received substantial attention from L2 researchers. Several scholars, however, came to question the applicability of the model into foreign language learning (FLL) situations because Gardner’s model was based on studies that have utilized samples selected from Canada, which is presumed to be a typical context of second language learning (SLL). Therefore, the present study investigated the generalizability of Gardner’s socio-educational model into FLL situations by using two samples of Korean learners of English selected from the USA (i.e., ESL sample) and Korea (i.e., EFL sample). To this end, a multi-sample Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis was performed to examine the factorial similarity of Gardner’s model across the ESL and EFL sample. Results of the SEM analysis indicated that the socio-educational model may also hold for learners of L2 in FLL situations. Further multi-sample analysis identified parameters that were not invariant across two samples of Korean learners of English, hence highlighting a call to fine-tune the Attitudes/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) for use in the context of FLL.

The purpose of this study is to establish English as elective subjects for 11~12 grades in Korean high schools. This study was conducted in the form of survey including a total of 1,923 participants, consists of 728 high school English teachers, 984 high school students, and 939 parents. The questionnaire consisted of nine questions, and which were designed to elicitate the participants perception and needs on English as the elective subjects in high schools. The results of the study indicate that 1) we need the subjects that include 4 skills(listening, speaking, reading, and writing), 2) binding listening and speaking skills together will meet the need of students and parents who want to choose conversation-only subjects, 3) on the other hand, binding reading and writing skills together will meet the needs of the students who want to prepare for establishing the academic basis in the future. 4) Various proficiency in English between students requires various level of the elective subjects in high school English. On the basis of these results, this study suggests we need 1) the subjects which deals with 4 skills on the basis of traditional concept, and 2) ‘listening and speaking’ subjects and ‘reading and writing’ subjects. And the subjects should have various levels between the highest level to the lowest level.

The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the acquisition process of the ellipsis at the end of sentences for Koreans who learn Japanese through the contrast of Chinese and English native speakers. The sample of analysis comes from OPI data. The two results below are described in detail: First, Koreans who learn Japanese use more frequently the ellipsis at the end of sentences under the “Existing-Verb-Clauses” than Chinese and English native speakers. However, the acquisition level goes up, the frequency of usage is getting higher to the point where the acquisition process is inclined to be equal at both side (Koreans who learn Japanese vs Chinese and English native speaker). Second, the formality varies more than Chinese and English native speakers, as well as it appears at the beginning level. The formality includes “「けど」,「から」,「て」,「ので」”.The formality of Chinese and English native speakers is similar to Koreans who learn Japanese at the end of the learning stage.