This paper examines how Korean college EFL students use contrastive conjunctions in their argumentative writing in comparison with native speaker college students’ use of them. The data consists of a Korean college students’ writing corpus, which was divided into a lower proficiency group and a higher proficiency group, and an American and British university students’ writing corpus. The findings reveal that the first two most frequently occurring forms are but and however in all four groups,although the usage patterns such as positioning differ between the NS and the NNS groups. The third most frequent form is on the other hand in both NNS groups and yet in both NS groups, which shows an interesting difference in that the NNS groups hardly use yet in their writing. Both NNS groups also show frequent misuses of conjunctive adverbials such as in contrast, on the contrary, and on the other hand. The paper concludes with some pedagogical implications and suggestions.

The study investigated whether Korean EFL students' vocabulary used in reading-based writing differed according to writing topic and their reading and writing proficiency. College students enrolled in writing courses (n=95) were asked to write argumentative essays in response to two readings on judging people by appearance (JPA) and disclosing personal information of serious criminals (DPI). These students were divided into high and low proficiency writer groups and into high and low proficiency reader groups according to their writing and reading scores respectively. The students' vocabulary used in writing was then analyzed by VocabProfile, which provided four lexical frequency lists: the first 1000 frequent words (K1) including function words (FW) and content words (CW), the second 1000 frequent words (K2), academic word list (AWL), and off the list words (OLW). The results indicated that the topic JPA produced a higher proportion of K1 and content words, whereas DPI generated more K2 and off the list words. None of the vocabulary profiles, however, significantly differed according to the students’ reading proficiency. In contrast, proficient writers were found to use significantly more K1 and function words than their counterparts. With the topic effect further considered, for JPA, proficient writers used more K1 words and function words whereas less proficient writers used more K2 and off the list words. With regard to DPl, proficient writers were found to use more function words than low proficient writers. Findings are discussed in more detail, along with implications.

This study investigates how wikis can promote EFL student writing by providing a real audience and authentic purposes for writing. The activity described in this paper is writing a narrative story on a wiki. Thirty-eight college students participated in this activity. During the activity the students constructed and negotiated meaning collaboratively. They posted a total of 153 versions and made 530 changes over four weeks. This study identifies the students' idiosyncratic writing and editing patterns that appeared on the wiki in the dimension of level, type, and purpose. The study employs both qualitative and quantitative data analysis for a more robust data analysis and triangulation of the data. The final product of the students' writing on the wiki exhibited that peer editing was effective in enhancing the quality of writing. While students viewed writing as a solitary and private activity in many EFL writing classrooms, the students in this study perceived writing as a social and communicative activity when engaged in the wiki writing activity.

The majority of studies on L2 writing strategies to date has relied heavily on case study as a research methodology employing think-aloud protocols and texts written by the participants. Since the studies dealt with a small number of participants, the findings are inconclusive and sometimes contradictory, and little research on the writing strategies has been conducted in EFL contexts. The present study investigated EFL learners" writing strategies and compared the more-proficient writers" strategies to those of the less-proficient peers. It furthermore examined an assumption of a connection between writing strategy use and writing proficiency. The study was conducted with two writing classes that consisted of 26 more-proficient and 23 less-proficient writers. Two different proficiency groups were divided in proportion to students" scores on the diagnostic composition test. Strategies were measured by means of the modified questionnaire originally developed by Petri？ and Cz？rl (2003). The strategy items were stated in three different phases of the writing process (planning, while-writing, and revising). The results indicated that (1) the more-proficient writers used significantly more planning and while-writing strategies and (2) planning and revising strategies correlated significantly with students" composition scores.

While the professional literature abounds with the values of feedback on L2 language writings, few researchers have investigated the differential effects of types of feedback on the writing improvements in terms of proficiency levels. The purpose of the study was three-fold: to examine (1) the effects of three types of feedback, teacher, peer, and self-review on sixteen Korean college students" writing improvements; (2) the relationships between feedback types and proficiency levels; and (3) students" opinions on the feedback types such as preferences and reasons. The results showed that all types of feedback helped students improve their writings through revisions, but the effects of feedback differ from feedback type to type. The effects of teacher and peer review were significantly beneficial for students" writing, while the self-review was the least effective. In addition, the more advanced writers benefit from the peer or self-review, while the less proficient writers improved their writing from the teacher feedback, even though most of the students prefer the teacher feedback to the other types of feedback, peer and self-review. The theoretical background and pedagogical implications are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of prompt types on EFL learners’ writing performance. 6 university students and 10 university students were provided with bare and prose prompts and the fluency of their writings was measured by analyzing the length of product (word count) and mean length of T-units (MLTU) was used to measure syntactic complexity. Furthermore, independent T-tests were administered in addition to qualitative analysis in order to determine whether the differences between the two types of prompts were significant. The results showed that while high school students’ writing wrote longer texts and had higher MLTU on the prose prompt than the bare prompt, a large portion of their writing was copied from the prompt when they were provided with the prose prompt. The university students’ writing showed that they wrote longer texts and had higher MLTU on the bare prompt than the prose prompt. In addition, they had responded after the test that they were able to write more freely when they were given the bare prompt. The findings of this study suggest that test developers need to consider the effects of prompt types and examine the quality of the writings more carefully.

The purpose of this current study aims to examine how much Korean EFL students incorporate their given peer responses into their final versions of writing in two different types of CMC environment, chatting and bulletin board, and whether there was any improvement in participants’ writing quality in the final drafts. 38 Korean EFL participants wrote first drafts, received peers’ responses through either chatting or bulletin board, individually revised their drafts based on their peer responses and wrote their final drafts. The overall results revealed that regardless of using either chatting or bulletin board, the participants incorporated higher portion of their given responses into the revised drafts. Although no significant differences were obtained with respect to two different modes, chatting and bulletin board, in terms of writing improvement in participants’ final drafts, there were significant differences found within chatting and bulletin board classes with both holistic and analytic measurement. Therefore, the present study suggests the importance of utilizing both CMC tools in writing environment for EFL students and applying them at appropriate steps in the writing process.

Vocabulary expansion is essential for learners to gain proficiency in L2, but learners’ lexical knowledge has not drawn much research attention in SLA (Howarth, 1996). In an attempt to throw light on a neglected aspect of learners’ competence, this paper investigates the use of a lexical item in the writing corpora. In particular, it compares the frequency and distribution of intensifiers in the EFL corpus with those in a native English corpus. The result of the frequency analysis in the EFL corpus offers an evidence of significant overuse of the limited types of maximizers and boosters, which in turn result in the inflated frequency of intensifiers. Further, the present study uses the mutual information score to measure the strength of the bond between selected intensifiers and adjacent lexical items. The result does not clearly demonstrate associations between the intensifier and the adjacent words due to the small corpus size, but it provides some possible pedagogical implications for L2 teaching. The frequency information rather than the information on the strength of associations between intensifiers and adjacent words, for example, would be more helpful to EFL learners.