The purpose of this study is to examine the function and spread of English in Korean academic society by investigating the use of English in writing dissertations. To this end, this study selected one of the universities in Korea and attempted to identify to what extent English has been used in master"s and doctoral dissertations for the last 12 years. The results show that the use of English in writing both master"s and doctoral dissertations has increased gradually and there exists a discrepancy among the fields of study. The results also reveal that a number of dissertations in the fields of natural science, engineering and medical science have been written in English recently. The comparison of the results of this study and some related analyses in European universities indicates a similar trend of English use in academic fields. Understanding the current use of English in Koreanacademic society can lead to a better understanding of the role and function of English in Korea as a whole.

This paper aims to explore the problematic nature of the use of adverbial connectors employed in NNS and NS academic essays by using two different corpora from Korean university students and from English native speakers in the UK. Combining corpus-based and discourse analytic approaches, the study focuses on the frequency and distributions of adverbial connectors, thus investigating in what ways this can affect the rhetorical features in terms of the text cohesion and structure. The results indicate that the Korean sample students shared the problem of other L2 writers with the overuse of overall connectors, but they showed a strong preference for using colloquial and spoken forms of adverbial connectors. On semantic relations, the overuse problem occurred in the listing, in particular, reinforcing types of the adverbial connectors. The noteworthy difference is that the mechanical repetitions of listing and contrasting ideas, and connecting them in a cause-effect sequence was identified more frequently in the Korean student texts than in the native student ones. However, counter-argument is more preferred in the argumentative context of the native student texts with more overt use of contrastive connecting items. Finally, most of the misused connectors were identified to simply repeat the ideas in the same viewpoint, which may have led to a failure in developing logical sequences in argumentative discourse. Another misuse type of connectors may derive from sociopragmatic transfer from L1 to L2. The findings thus may give some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise culture-specific register awareness and understand the different semantic types of adverbial connectors.