The purpose of this study is to examine cohesive devices in English writing textbooks and Korean college students’ writings through text and corpus analyses. An analysis of three writing textbooks used in one college English program in Seoul showed that the textbooks did not cover a full range of cohesive devices; instead, they focused on sentence transitions and conjunctions, which L2 writers often overuse or misuse. Other cohesive devices such as demonstratives and lexical cohesive devices such as synonyms, paraphrasing, or collocations, however, were rarely covered. To understand how Korean college students actually use cohesive devices in writing, this study also analyzed the frequencies of sentence transitions and demonstratives in learner and native speaker corpora. The results revealed L2 learners’ tendency to overuse sentence transitions and demonstrative pronouns compared to native speakers. However, the results also showed that as proficiency increases, learners tend to use fewer sentence transitions.

Since the notion of World Englishes attracted growing attention, the dichotomy between native speakers (NS) and nonnative speakers (NNS) has been challenged. Nonetheless, the belief that NS teachers are superior to NNS teachers still persists. Against this background, this study investigated how Korean college students perceived NNS English instructors and whether students' experiences with NNS teachers and English proficiency level influenced their perception. Data were collected from 472 students enrolled in communication-oriented English courses through questionnaires. Data analysis revealed that Korean college students generally had favorable perceptions of NNS instructors. Moreover, findings revealed that students perceived grammar teaching to be NNS instructors' greatest strength while culture teaching to be their biggest weakness. The study also found that the students who had learned from NNS instructors, had more positive views of NNS than the students who had not had any relevant NNS teaching-learning experiences. Similarly, lower level learners' perception was found to be more positive than higher level learners' perception.

This study examined the linguistic and methodological issues that arose as two Korean professors taught their subject matter in English to Korean college students and how each professor used the comments and suggestions provided by a teacher trainer. The participants included two Korean female professors who taught their major course in English. The data came from the analysis of the two professors’video-recorded lessons, the teacher trainer’s notes of follow-up discussions with each professor, and students’ response to the surveys. The results showed that the two Korean EFL professors exhibited more methodological than linguistic issues as they delivered their subject matter in English. Additionally, the way they used the trainer’s comments on their instruction revealed differences. One professor closely followed them, thereby changing her future instruction, whereas the other did not pay close attention to them; consequently, her subsequent lessons showed little transformation from her first lesson. This study suggests that it is important to establish a systematic support system for Korean EFL content professors who deliver their lesson in English.

Little research exists on expatriate language teachers’ experiences and attitudes toward their students and teaching contexts, particularly venues with younger learners, in an L2 setting. Thus, this study investigated native English-speaking teachers’ (NESTs) experiences of and attitudes toward teaching and interacting with Korean elementary school children in the Korean elementary school context. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with five NESTs who have worked, and are still working, in various areas of Korea. Findings indicated that the NESTs of the current study were holding relatively positive attitudes toward Korean children as well as teaching them English. The NESTs viewed Korean children as engaging and responsive learners, but stressed the importance of their own roles in creating an environment for the children’s better engagement. The NESTs’ experiences varied whether they had upper and lower grade elementary school children and whether they taught main classes or after-school classes, etc. Finally, the NESTs experienced challenges when dealing with children with extremely different levels of English in one classroom and with managing disorderly behaviors of after-school classes. Based on the findings of the study, practical implications for both NESTs and Korean teachers are provided.

The purpose of this study is to examine effective ways to introduce creative thinking skills development in the English learning classroom, specifically, focusing on questioning techniques and creative thinking techniques. The study explores selected creative-thinking techniques which are in accordance with English teaching methods and goals in the Korean context. The techniques highlighted were deemed adequate for enhancing creative and analytical thinking skills of English language learners and include the following: Brainwriting, SCAMPER, Lotus Blossom Technique, Forced Relationships/Analogy, Wishful Thinking Technique, Six Thinking Hats, SWOT, PMI technique, Flat Stanley Project. The study attempts to outline examples of and procedures for implementing such techniques in English education. The study is intended to provide insights for both researchers and practitioners alike and shall thus contribute to the ongoing discussion of integrating creativity education with English learning and teaching.

This study aims to investigate differences between task-based learning and teaching (TBLT) and storytelling-based learning and teaching (SBLT), focusing on teaching interaction in Korean elementary schools. The present study is motivated by the realization of the effects of teaching English by telling stories in comparison with TBLT, which has been effectively implemented in language classrooms. This study investigates eight task-based classrooms and eight storytelling-based classrooms in conjunction with teacher interviews. The findings indicate that frequencies of teacher talk and L1 interaction are significantly higher in TBLT than those in SBLT, and frequencies of other utterance types are significantly different between the two. These distinctions result in the two main interaction patterns for TBLT and SBLT, respectively. In addition, the interviews with teachers indicate that the atmosphere of TBLT classroom interaction has a tendency to be competent, and that of SBLT has a tendency to be enjoyable.

The present study addresses a learnability problem in the acquisition of English progressive aspect by Korean learners of English. As Korean and English differ in the way that the lexical aspect of verbs interacts with progressive morphology, we predicted that Korean learners of English would be affected by their L1 aspectual system, accepting non-targetlike combinations of lexical aspect and aspectual morphology. Sixty Korean university students were presented with sentences containing different aspectual classes of verbs in two conditions—the progressive and the simple present—and were asked to judge the naturalness of the sentences. The results showed that the majority of the learners erroneously accepted progressive sentences containing stative verbs. It also showed that the learners accepted simple present constructions containing eventitive verbs for an ongoing interpretation,indicating the pervasiveness of L1 transfer. The findings strongly suggest that Korean EFL learners have difficulty ruling out erroneous form-meaning associations based on their L1 progressive morphology.

This study draws on recent corpus-based information to investigate the influence of frequency on Korean ESL learners’ acquisition of English verbs occurring with the double object construction (DC). Thirty low English proficiency Koreans (LPK), 30high English proficiency Koreans (HPK), and 30 native English speakers (NS)participated in an acceptability judgment test and an elicited production task featuring six high frequency (HF) verbs and six low frequency (LF) verbs. Results indicate that (a) both the LPK and the HPK more favorably accepted and more frequently produced DC sentences with HF verbs than with LF verbs and (b) the HPK more favorably accepted and more frequently produced DC sentences with both HF and LF verbs than the LPK. These results are interpreted as evidence for the significant role of frequency in Korean learners’ acquisition of English verbs occurring with the DC. The study ends with a discussion of theoretical and pedagogical implications.

The current study focused on acquisition of If-conditionals by L2 learners of English with two different native tongues, Spanish and Korean, and with two different proficiency levels, high and low. An experiment with two subparts, each focusing on production and comprehension respectively, was performed in order to explore which factor among input frequencies, grammatical complexities and L1 influence best explains the acquisition of If-conditionals by L2 learners. The results from both production and comprehension data suggest that If-conditionals with lower hypotheticality are acquired before than those with higher hypotheticality by L2learners, just as they are by children learning their L1, and hierarchies of input frequencies best explain the acquisition order of If-conditionals. At this point, it is not possible to distinguish between influences of input frequencies and typological universals, as they coincide. One thing for sure is that both L1 and L2 acquisitions seem to be influenced by them, suggesting the universality of language acquisition. Influence of instruction, on the other hand, was also found, especially in the production data of the higher-level L2 learners. Even though there were no differences in the acquisition order of If-conditionals between the two groups of learners with different L1 backgrounds, the influence of L1 was also found in the analysis of non-target forms produced by learner participants.

We investigated the possibility of whether there is a post-vocalic ‘r’ in phonological representations of Korean L2 English speakers and the extent to which they exploit their knowledge of mapping graphemes onto phonemes within each correspondence between orthography and phonemes. First, the results obtained in the pseudohomophone task showed that R-items were responded to with higher accuracy and shorter RT than Non-R items. It suggests that there is no post-vocalic ‘r’ in phonological representations of Korean L2 speakers unlike Australian native English speakers and that Korean L2 learners are truly non-rhotic speakers. Another striking finding is that accuracy and RT for visual lexical access varied depending on the transparency between orthography and its corresponding phonemes. This indicates that Korean L2 speakers’ knowledge about the association of graphemes and phonemes varies depending on each type of correspondence between spellings and phonemes. Finally, it was found that the frequency of the base words also affected the retrieval of words along with the orthographic depth in grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences.

There has been considerable research which investigates whether the underlying linguistic competence of L2 learners is constrained by principles and parameters of UG, parallel to the situation in L1 acquisition. In terms of the Scope Principle (henceforth SP), a principle of UG, which is associated with the scope interaction between a quantified expression and a wh-phrase, some experimental studies in EFL settings were conducted to investigate whether or not interlanguage grammars can be characterized by the principle. These experiments were carried out through the Truth Value Judgment Task (henceforth TVJT) alone, showing contrasting and confusing results, especially between Japanese learners and Korean learners. That is, while Japanese EFL learners observed the SP, Korean EFL learners did not despite the fact that both Japanese L1 grammar and Korean L1 grammar disallow the distributive interpretation, especially in the ambiguous sentence like what does everyone have? Therefore, the present study aims to confirm whether the same results are obtained provided that the identical experiment using the TVJT is repeated in other EFL learners. Noticeably, this study employed an additional, complementary task (Question and Answer Task, QAT) in addition to the TVJT as an attempt to increase the accuracy of the task and reflect learners’ actual knowledge of the target features. In QAT, the subjects were asked to write the answers to the target questions involving quantifiers and wh-questions in English. Results from the TVJT appeared, on the face of it, to provide support for the claim that the Korean EFL learners are under control of the Scope Principle. However, findings from QAT revealed that they are not constrained by the principle. Thus, it would be reasonable to conclude that the results of the present experiment do not fully support the claim that the Korean EFL learners’ interlanguage grammar has access to the UG-driven Scope Principle. Instead, it can be argued that Korean learners' interlanguage grammar may be affected by their L1 grammar, which gives rise to the claim that the explicit instruction on the interpretation of those sentences is required as part of overcoming this problem.

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.

Lee Jin-sung. 2012. A Study of English Neologisms with Some Comparing Notes on Korean Neologisms. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 20(2). pp. 367-400. This study examines how English is reflecting the changing society on neologisms, and how the language and the society is interwoven in neologisms of English. It also investigates English neologisms from the perspective of morphological formation and semantic change. In doing this Korean neologisms are partly dealt with comparatively to bring out the contrastive characters of the two languages. From the sociolinguistic point of view, the data were classified into three categories: society, life style, and people. These were further subdivided into several areas: general affairs, economics, IT new jobs, new technology under the category of society; language, daily lives, leisure, health, food, and apparel under the life style; men and women, men, women, youngsters and the olds under the people. It was found that the categorial classifications of neologisms reveals how social change is reflected on neologisms of each language, and also discloses the way the two languages enrich their expressive power. From the perspective of morphological formation and semantic change, the English data were classified into compounds, new words, verbal phrases, and independent expressions. The compounds were subdivided into simple compounds and compounds within compounds to diagnose the degree of recursive character in English. In the category of new words, the followings were investigated: affixations, blendings, abbreviations, acronyms, euphemisms, semantic shifts, foreign languages, functional shifts, coinages and clippings. The distribution of neologisms in regard to their parts of speech was also examined. In comparing notes of the two languages, thefollowings are provided: first, sociocultural character reflected on neologisms; second, the frequencies and characterizations of neologisms from morphological perspectives; third, the distribution of parts of speech.

This study investigates the types and frequencies of verb errors in Korean college students' essays in order to ascertain what aspects of English verb use Korean learners find most troublesome. The data used in this study were retrieved from a learner corpus consisting of essays written by 399 students who major in humanities at a university in Seoul. The 686 verb errors found in the corpus were classified into the following four major categories: (a) omission of necessary items in a verb phrase, (b) addition of unnecessary items in a verb phrase, (c) misformation ofa verb phrase, and (d) misordering of items in a verb phrase. A careful examination of these 686 verb errors has revealed that misformation is the most common form of error, accounting for over 60% of all the errors. A sub-category of misformation errors, agreement errors in turn accounted for more than half of all the 4 I 6 misformation errors (216 tokens), a number bigger than any of the other three categories of error types, i.e. omission (175 tokens), addition (72 tokens), and misordering (23 tokens). This finding might have resulted from negative influence from the students' L I, as Korean verbs do not conjugate according to grammatical person. Another noteworthy finding is the fact that the students made a great number of errors with both the lexical and the auxiliary uses of be and have. Considering that both uses of these two verbs are taught early on in Korea, this finding suggests that Korean students need to be continually provided with contexts in which they can practice different uses of be and have.