A recent survey of Australian directors conducted by the Financial Reporting Council found that directors require a detailed understanding of technical accounting issues. With the aim of understanding learner difficulties in learning and applying higher learning material relevant to directors, this study explores the transfer pricing topic taught as a case presentation in an undergraduate accounting program at an Australian university. Before intervention with improvements, this study invited 25 students to take part in the study after they had learned the topic and been given one week to understand it. By adopting a transfer pricing problem presented in their essential reading and interviewing those students to gain further insights, the study found that learners experienced conceptual difficulties at various stages in attempting to learn. Intervention to ease learning difficulties was addressed through instructor training. The intervention improvements included using guided workbooks to develop a better understanding of concepts among learners, and representing the problem at hand with diagrams. After intervention with improvements, this study repeated the same procedures with 25 students who had not taken part in the previous study and found that interventions increased the learning. Results have implications for most directors, who are novices to the detailed technical accounting issues of transfer pricing.

The goal of this study is to investigate the use of the two English synonymous adjectives difficult and hard through BNC, and to examine Korean college students’knowledge of difficult/hard+noun expressions. The main findings of this paper are as follows. First, The adjective difficult is mainly (83.33%) used to mean ‘not easy to do or deal with’, while hard is mainly (60%) used as idiomatic expressions. Second, both adjectives have different meanings according to the nouns which they are combined with (hard rock/life, difficult decision/concept), and sometimes they have a radically different meaning even when they are combined with the same noun (difficult man, hard man). Third, The average score of the subjects was as low as 54.50%. Fourth, The average score by type is in the order of hard+noun (77.19%), difficult+noun (45.46%) and difficult-hard+noun(38.34%), which shows that the subjects’ overall knowledge of difficult/hard+noun combinations is considerably poor and unbalanced. This result implies that Korean learners of English need to study English, not just memorizing individual words, but with a focus on chunks.