The purpose of this paper is to examine the level-appropriateness of listening tasks in middle-school English activity books, which have been used in Korean secondary schools since 2009 in order to facilitate level-differentiated learning. Five different kinds of middle-school English activity books from grade 1 to grade 3 (i.e., 15 in total) were randomly chosen for analysis. It was found that the listening task difficulty of activity books as a whole became greater as the proficiency level went up, which implied listening tasks were well sequenced regarding the proficiency level. Some activity books, however, showed a problem with sequencing listening tasks in terms of difficulty because the task difficulty in the higher grade was lower than that in the lower grade. In terms of listening task difficulty, in addition, activity books were not homogeneous even in the same level. Implications of the findings for the level– appropriateness of listening tasks and further research into listening task difficulty are discussed.

This study examined whether explicit or implicit teaching is more efficient in improving Korean middle school students’ English verb−noun collocation knowledge. Forty Korean EFL middle school students participated in the study and they were assigned to either the explicit instruction or implicit instruction group. The participants’ English verb−noun collocation knowledge was measured through pre-, immediate post-, and delayed post-tests over the 5- week experimental period, and a survey of participants’ opinions on the instruction they received was carried out. The results showed that the students who received the explicit collocation instruction displayed better learning outcomes, suggesting the immediate influence of the explicit instruction, and more importantly the sustained initial advantage. That is, the explicit group students did retain the target items significantly better than the implicit group students. The responses from the two groups also indicated the positive effects of the explicit collocation instruction. The explicit group students were mostly satisfied with the instruction and showed increased confidence in acquiring English collocations while the implicit students did not. This study provides L2 teachers with valuable information on how to teach L2 collocation more effectively.

Thi s study investigated, using think-aloud protocol, what L2 learners focus on, notice and uptake in a series of English writing task and how this cognitive process is affected by their English proficiency. Nine Korean middle school students were engaged in a three-stage writing task, which consisted of the compos ing stage, the stage of comparing their own text with a reformulated version, and the revising stage. During the first two stages, the students were asked to think out loud in Korean. The results show that in the composing stage the high level students tended to focus on grammatical forms while the low level groups more concentrated on lexical items. When reformulations were provided, the students well noticed the diffe rences between their original texts and the reformulated ones but a majority of their noticing remained simple noticing without a proper reason or ended up with wrong inferences. Thi s overall shallow and incorrect process at the comparing stage resulted in re latively little changes in the revising stage. These fi ndings suggest that not only the quantity but also the quality of noticing is important for acquisition and more guidance and he lp should be provided for low level learners to benefit from writing and feedback.

This study aimed to identify the continuity between 6th grade elementary school English textbooks and 1st grade middle school English textbooks using Coh-Meu'ix, an automated web-based program designed to analyze and calculate the coherence oftexts on a wide range of measures. The measured value of text types was compared and classified into the surface linguistic features (the basic count, word rrequency, readabi li ty, connective information, pronoun information, word information) and the deep linguistic features (co-referential cohesion and semantic cohesion, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity). The findings were as follows: First, the basic counts and words before the main verb had a significant different value between two levels of textbooks. The results were remarkably different in the written language. Second, FKGL (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level) and the pronoun ratio were significantly different only in the written language. In addition, type-token ratios in written language showed more significant differences than spoken language. Third, other language features showed only a mild and gradual difference. Finally, the resu lt indicated there were no statistical differences of discourse aspects.

최근 교육과정에 있어서 의사소통능력이 강조됨에 따라서 듣기, 말하기가 특히 강조되는 반면, 읽기와 쓰기 즉, 문자언어에 관한 학습능력 역시 같이 향상되고 있는지에 대해서는 논란의 여지가 많았고, 학교단위 수준에서 보면 오히려 부정적인 견해도 많았다. 이것은 알파벳, 단어, 문법, 구문, 독해로 이어지는 기존의 일반적인 상향식 학습의 폐해로 여겨지기 때문에, 문자언어에 미숙한 중학생이라 할지라도 텍스트 전체로부터 접근하는 하향식 읽기 방법을 접목할 필요가 있다. 글의 전체적인 구조와 전개방식에 대해 배경지식을 가진다면 읽기가 훨씬 수월해 질 것이기 때문이다. 쓰기의 경우에도 빈칸 채우기나 문장 단위의 통제되거나 유도된 수준에 그치는 경우가 많고, 실생활에 필요한 자유 작문 형태의 쓰기 학습은 소홀히 다루어지고 있는 것이 현실이다. 이 문제 역시 영어교사들이 자유 작문을 시도해 볼 신뢰성 있는 틀이나 형식이 없기 때문에 그 필요성을 인정하면서도 실제로 수업에서 적용키 어려운 점이 있었다. 이 같은 상황을 학생과 교사 입장에서 개선할 수 있는 효과적인 방법으로서, EFL(English as a Foreign Language) 상황 하에서 읽기와 쓰기를 체계적으로 연계시킨 좀 더 새로운 학습방법이 고안될 필요가 있었다. 본 논문은 비교적 최근의 이론인 과정-장르 중심 접근법에 이론적 근거를 두고, 장르별로 텍스트의 전체적인 구조와 언어적 특징을 구별하고, 이것을 쉽게 도식화한 스켈레톤 다이어그램을 그려 봄으로써, 읽기와 쓰기에 동시에 효과적인 새로운 접근법을 구안하였다.

This study investigates the effects of shadowing, the oral repetition of what is said right after the language spoken, on L2 listening and speaking abilities of Korean middle school students. It also examines whether shadowing has a positive effect on students’ affective aspects in terms of self-confidence, preference, and perception. The experiment was conducted with 108 middle school students in Gwangju. The participants were divided into three groups, listening only, shadowing only, and listening plus shadowing, and received six weeks of treatment. The data collection consisted of the result of listening tests, speaking tests and questionnaires. The results showed that listening plus shadowing had a positive effect on L2 listening abilities compared to listening only techniques. The results also showed that there was no positive effect of shadowing on L2 speaking abilities. In addition, the results indicated that shadowing increased students’ self-confidence in using English, their shadowing preferences, and the positive perception about the efficacy of shadowing on English speaking skills improvement. This paper therefore argues that shadowing techniques need to be considered as an effective supplementary technique for practicing English listening skills in EFL middle school context.

This paper investigated the effects of Korean syllable structure on the acquisition of English consonant clusters on the basis of the speech data collected from a total of 8 Korean middle school students (2 females and 6 males). A total of 24 English monosyllabic words that formed 8 different quasi minimal triplets was employed and recorded. Each triplet consisted of mono-consonantal, bi-consonantal, and tri-consonantal words like pin, spin, spring or pin, pink, pinks. The three words at four triplets were differentiated by the number of consonants at the onset position and those at the other four triplets, at the coda position. Using a 5 point-scale scoring method, two native English speakers rated the speech data in terms of (i) intelligibility and (ii) the scoring of bi- and tri-consonantal words with three points being fixed on mono-syllabic words. The main finding was that the tri-consonantal words scored the lowest, bi-consonantal words were in the middle, and mono-consonantal words scored the highest. But, this general tendency held true only at the words dissimilar at the coda position. At the onset position, on the other hand, the mono-consonantal words scored the lowest. The in-depth analysis that followed the rating showed that a comparison of the words in terms of the syllabic intelligibility can be properly made only when each consonant comprising a syllable is intelligibly articulated on its own.

This study investigates how language teaching in middle school English classrooms takes place in terms of teaching methods and TETE classes. One-hundred and seven middle school English teachers in Seoul and Kyunggi Province participated in this study. Participants were asked to answer the questions on the web. Among the participants, 8 teachers were interviewed. Regarding teaching methods, some teachers used communicative teaching methods most frequently, while others still preferred grammar-translation and audiolingual approaches to communicative approaches. Pair work was actively used in classes rather than teacher-dominant explanations. Regarding group work, some teachers chose it as one of their preferred activities but others avoided group works for reasons of difficulties with control, time management, and lack of presentation in textbooks. Most teachers considered reading as the most important but dealt with a great amount of listening, reading, and speaking in textbooks. Multimedia were used to stimulate motivation from the students in classes: CD-ROM was used most frequently, followed by powerpoint. Most teachers, who used English about 30~50% of their class time, agreed on the effectiveness of TETE and came up with the effective ways in teaching. Teachers had different experiences with native English teachers. Some teachers had doubts about usefulness of native English teachers in classes. To bring about good teaching from native English teachers, they should be acquainted with characteristics of Korean students and culture and should discuss lesson plans with Korean teachers in advance.

Textbook is very important in English learning and teaching. The goals of this paper are (i) to analyze the distributions of modal auxiliaries in middle school and high school English textbooks and (ii) to compare the analysis results with those of the general- purpose English corpora. Our study is based on Corpus Linguistics, and we are using corpus-analysis methods and tools in our research. In our study, we consider English textbooks as corpus texts and we will analyze them with NLPTools, which is a corpus- analyzing program. After we survey the distributions of modal auxiliaries, we will focus on a modal auxiliary can. We will examine not only syntactical distributions of a modal can but also semantic/functional distributions of this modal in English textbooks. In order to analyze the semantical distributions of can, we will use semantic tags and divide its semantic/functional category into three groups: ability, permission, and possibility. We will also divide the syntactic distributions into the nine verb phrase structures. After we closely examine the syntactic and semantic/functional distributions of a modal can, we will compare the analysis results with those of the LLC Corpus, the LOB Corpus, and the British National Corpus. Through the study, we want to show that the actual distributions and usages of a modal can in middle and high school English textbooks are a little different from those in other general-purpose English corpora.

This study aims at investigating the effects of phonological short-term memory (PSTM), learning styles, and oral repetition on middle school students" learning of English vocabulary. Two groups had different treatments (semantic learning and oral repetition) and vocabulary learning was assessed in spelling, meaning, and production twice, immediately after the learning sessions and two weeks thereafter. The results reveal that oral repetition and the PSTM capacity affected the vocabulary learning significantly, but not learning styles. The students with a higher PSTM capacity learned significantly more words but didn"t remember them better for a longer period than those with a lower PSTM capacity. No clear effects of learning styles were noted, while the PSTM capacity of auditory learners was higher than that of visual learners. The oral repetition group learned significantly more words than those who did only semantic learning, which suggests the usefulness of oral repetition in learning new vocabulary.

The purpose of this study was to determine the most effective method of forming cooperative small groups for middle school English classes using ICT. To achieve this goal, the two experimental classes composed of 73 middle school 2nd graders were taught in a task-based teaching-learning model using ICT for 12 weeks. Throughout the 12-week period, two types of grouping models were applied to the students: Experimental class A consisted of differentiated heterogeneous group based on the regular English examination marks, and experimental class B was made up of a differentiated heterogeneous group based on the ICT skill standard for student (ISSS). The study discovered the small group based on the ISSS showed significantly different statistical results in the cognitive, affective and information-using skills. The ISSS could be used as an additional criterion in forming small groups for middle school English classes. In fact, the study shows that it creates better results than the traditional grouping based on learners' English grades if the lessons are given in using ICT.