There is little research on the users of dictionaries in Korea. The user research, however, is essential to developing better dictionaries. Hence, this study aims to explore the actual conditions regarding Korean English teachers’ general use of English dictionaries. English teachers were chosen as the subjects because they instruct the use of dictionaries to other users, especially students, as well as use dictionary themselves. Thirty teachers from elementary, middle and high schools respectively (total 90) participated in this research. The research was conducted using questionnaires that consisted of two main parts: The first part was designed to analyze the teachers’ use of dictionaries and the second part aimed to investigate the teachers’ instruction on the use of dictionaries. The data were coded and factors were examined by means of quantitative analysis. It was found that English teachers in Korea used Korean-English and English-English dictionaries which are well structured and easy to use with full contents in order to prepare teaching materials and develop handouts other than text books. In addition, most of teachers said that students must be taught how to use dictionaries in the first grade of junior high school.

This study aims to investigate the effects of various types of input modification on English listening comprehension by Korean high school students. The participants of the study were assigned to three different types of listening input: one time listening, repetitive listening, and elaboration. They listened to five types of genres such as descriptive, narrative, comparison/contrast, causal/evaluation, and problem/solution This study examined how these different types of input and genres affect the students’ listening comprehension in terms of comprehension of main ideas and details, and inference, The results of the study revealed that different types of input modification and repetition influenced the students’ listening comprehension. For instance, repetitive listening and elaboration did not have a significant effect on the high-level students’ listening comprehension, whereas these types of input resulted in improvement in the low-level students’ listening comprehension. In addition, different input types had effects on the students’ listening comprehension according to the students’ proficiency levels. On the basis of the results, some pedagogical implications on the teaching of listening skills are presented.

A foreign accent in a second language (L2) may be caused by nonnative-like pronunciation of suprasegmental elements such as stress as well as segmental elements of the L2 phonological system. In the literature of L2 phonological acquisition, however, most studies have focused on the segmental features and only a few studies have investigated the L2 acquisition of suprasegmental elements. This study examines the acquisition of English word stress by adult speakers of Korean in an attempt to see how they learn English stress patterns, particularly if they treat nouns and verbs differently and show sensitivity to the internal syllable structure with respect to stress assignment or if they treat English word stress entirely as a lexical phenomenon. For this, 51 Korean university students were assigned the production and perception tasks in which they were instructed to produce 35 monomorphemic nouns and verbs classified into 7 classes according to stress patterns and listen to them to mark on which syllable they perceived stress to be. It was revealed in this study that although they had no knowledge of stress placement associated with lexical category, vowel weight and the extramatricality of word-final consonants in English, they showed sensitivity to the effect of coda consonants, treating open and closed syllables differently. Based on the results of this research, pedagogical implications are suggested for the teaching of English word stress.

This paper aims to compare generic features of a specific genre in Korean and English language. For this purpose, written advertisements from magazines in two languages were compiled and small corpora of equivalent genres were analyzed from a perspective of comparative genre analysis. The focus of analysis was given to the ‘lexical’, ‘structural’, and ‘other choices’, by exploring the discourse values within a specific context. The case is to raise foreign language learners’ awareness of language form within a meaningful context, represented in a relevant genre. In this study, the comparison is narrowed down to written advertisements through cross-linguistic comparison. It shows that comparative corpora of familiar genres can be used to help learners realize the ways FL is explored to achieve particular communicative goals. Furthermore, it can lead naturally to the discussion of cultural and social aspects reflected in the language.

The present experimental study explores developmental characteristics of Korean EFL learners’ English negatives and yes-no interrogatives. Adopting the functional category acquisition framework within the UG theory, this study investigated 12 elementary and secondary school students’ interlanguage grammar by elicited production. The results showed that the learners’ interlanguage grammar developed gradually from VP to IP and CP structures in English negatives. However, their interlanguage grammar did not show gradual developmental tendency in yes-no interrogatives. The acquisition rate of negatives generally increased with the learners’ level whereas there existed individual variation in the acquisition rate and developmental aspect of yes-no interrogatives. This result suggests that CP structures instantiated by yes-no interrogatives seem to be acquired from the initial stage by some learners.

The present study investigates the effect of pronunciation training on Korean adult learners’ perception and production of English vowels, /i/, /I/, /u/, and /Ω/. The study examines 1) the effect of pronunciation training on perception and production and 2) the maintenance of the effect over a one-month period. The subjects were 10 Korean graduate students who took a 4-week long English pronunciation training course. They were tested before and after pronunciation training and tested again one month after the training. In each test, both perception and production of the vowels were tested to see if the subjects were able to distinguish tense and lax vowels. In the perception part, subjects listened for words and checked the vowel (either tense or lax) sound they heard. For the production part, subjects read the selected words which contained the target vowels. The results show that pronunciation training has an effect, which supports the teachability of phonology in adulthood; however, the maintenance of the effect demonstrated a difference between perception and production, in which the effect was maintained in production but not in perception. Based on the results of the study, implications are discussed.

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/.

The purposes of this paper are to report the English proficiency of Korean university students through TOEIC test, and to suggest feasible ways to improve their communicative competence. A total of one thousand and forty-two sophomore students who took the Practical English course participated in this study. The data based on TOEIC scores were analyzed and the major findings revealed that: (1) Although students had slightly higher scores on the written language sections than on the spoken language parts, they had the lowest scores in the grammar section; (2) The total listening comprehension scores were significantly correlated with the total reading scores; (3) There was a high positive correlation between students’ proficiency level and their scores; (4) Multiple regression analysis showed that part 3 (short conversations) influenced significantly on the total listening part, while part 6 (grammar) had a significant effect on the total reading part. In conclusion, these findings contribute to the emerging picture of what constitutes a successful language learner by proposing a more refined model based on Willis’. In conclusion, the results of this study offer several suggestions for language teaching professionals as providers of effective instruction of communication strategies for enhancing the development of communicative competence.

This study aims at investigating Korean high school students’ reading and writing relations in English with a focus on analysis of effects of reading journal writing which integrates reading and writing. Three groups (reading, writing, reading journal writing) had different treatments for 8 weeks. The results revealed that the reading journal writing group had the highest post-test writing scores compared with the two other groups. This group’s scores were statistically significant different from the reading group’s. The same results were also found in the higher-level group. As for the lower-level group, however, the scores of the writing group were highest. These results support the bidirectional hypothesis with a special emphasis on the interaction of reading and writing. The higher-level and the lower-level reading journal writing group had the highest post-test reading scores; however, no statistical significance was noted among the three groups. The results of the reading test do not seem to be clearly related to any hypothesis of reading-writing relations. The results of the questionnaire survey and interview and of the analysis of reading journal suggest that effects of reading journal writing can vary with reading texts and learners’ language proficiency level.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of English oral presentation strategy training (OPST) in EFL contexts. For this study, eight university students of 4 high and 4 low proficiency level are selected. The participants were provided with an OPST over 5 weeks including 8 times of training. During the OPST, the participants learned 25 strategy, 17 verbal and 8 non-verbal strategies. The verbal strategies were again divided into two parts: general verbal strategies and genre specific strategies. For the validity of the present study a “triangulation” was achieved through the use of video recording, classroom observation, questionnaire, in-depth interview, and the native English speaker’s evaluation. The results of the study demonstrated that the participants showed some improvement in the use of presentation strategies, especially organizational and verbal components of the strategies rather than nonlinguistic components. The proficiency level of the participants had an effect on the frequency of use of strategies after the OPST. Overall, the OPST was found to have positive effects on the participants’ attitude toward English oral presentations. On the basis of the results of the study, some teaching implications for improving presentation skills in university EAP contexts are provided.