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.

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.

The present study explores how high school English teachers perceive recently proposed or implemented English education policies. Among the policies are performance assessment, the depaπmentalized classroom system (DCS), 20 11 revised national curriculum for English, the two-Ievel (Types A' B) English tests in College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), and National English Ability Test (NEAT). The study examines three aspects ofteacher perception on each p이 icy: knowledge, attitudes, and implementation. A questionnaire was administered, and the responses of 395 high school English teachers were analyzed‘ The res비ts showed that the knowledge aspect scored the highest for all five p이 icies while differences were revealed as to specific aspects of knowledge, attitudes, and implementation across different policies. It was also revealed that the attitude aspect was positively correlated with the implementation aspect and that correlation between attitude and implementation was higher than the 、 correlation between attitude and knowledge. The facto rs identified to be highly correlated with all five policies were teacher’s academic attainment, age, and teaching experience, the number of students per class, and the implementation of English creative school. Implications are suggested for in-service teacher development, English education policy-making, and effective policy implementation.

Choi, Kyung-ae. 2012. A study on the unexpected phonological change in the English loanwords in Korean from Japanese. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 20(1). pp. 295-315. The purpose of this study is to inquire about sound change by tracing the transition of English loanwords in Korean, which came from Japan, from phonological and sociolinguistic perspectives. The Japanese-style English loanwords from an earlier period have been transformed into newly adjusted forms at a surprisingly rapid rate and many of them have shown unexpected sound changes which went against general Korean phonological rules. This shows that sound change is not necessarily expected to occur in accordance with language-specific phonological rules. It can occur through the political and sociological will of speakers against their native grammar at a surprisingly rapid rate.

The study investigates whether different English learning contexts result in different grammar development in learners’ shared mother tongue, Korean. The research instrument included a sentence completion task of collocational expressions in Korean dialogues, a multiple-choice test of grammar in Korean sentences and dialogues, and a sentence composition task using double nominative structures. The participants were 26 students at the age of 8 to 9 year old in the EFL context, 21 in a type of immersion program, and 19 in the ESL context. The results showed little difference among the three groups in the collocation sentence completion task and the multiple-choice test, but a clearly significant difference between the EFL students and the ESL students in the double nominative sentence composition task. The students who had been learning English in English culture showed more limited knowledge in the writing sentences with such peculiar but common structures in Korean language, compared with those who had been learning English in a Korean cultural context. In the complementary correlation analysis of the scores in the sentence composition task with a double nominative structure, the length of residence in Korea proved the strongest correlation, implying that the longer students live in Korea, the better they perform. The study provides the pedagogical implication that the curriculum of a mother tongue for bilingual learners could need to intervene with more emphasis on enhancing learners’ grammatical development, including language-specific structures.

If the purpose of an assessment is diagnosing examinees’ knowledge states to improve their learning, more fine-grained information than the overall level of their ability is necessary. Recent advances in diagnostic assessment triggered the development of cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs), such as the deterministic inputs, noisy “And” gate (DINA) model. Although CDMs for language assessments have been applied to reading or listening test data, a CDM may produce more practical results if the construct to measure has specific and well-defined skill attributes as in a grammar assessment. For this study, a grammar test consisting of 40 multiple-choice items was administered to 3,000 Korean learners of English as a foreign language. From the test items, a Q-matrix, which is an essential tool for CDMs, was constructed based on six grammar skills. As a result, skill profiles were obtained for all examinees. This diagnostic information can be used for tailored instruction. Issues with regard to applications of CDMs to language assessments are also discussed.

The English language does not possess a 3rd person singular epicene pronoun normally used in a sex-indefinite or gender-neutral context, so the masculine 3rd person singular “he” has taken the role for over centuries. However, many researchers have indicated that generic he is not exclusively sex-neutral in that it evokes masculine imagery. For this reason, in English speaking countries, singular they has successfully evolved as an alternative to generic he. Nevertheless, in the Korean EFL setting, where the importance of English education has been emphasized, the actual use and perception of the English epicene pronoun has rarely been considered. In this context, this study investigated Korean EFL learners’ use and perception of the 3rd person epicene pronoun in sex-neutral contexts. The research observed that generic he was the learners’ most preferred choice of pronoun though it indeed evoked masculine images, whereas singular they was neither widely accepted, nor often used. The present study also determined to what extent the use and perception of epicene pronouns were related to and affected by linguistic and biographical variables. It was also demonstrated that simplicity in epicene pronoun use could have assumed priority over nonsexist expression among some Korean EFL learners. The present study has implications in that it contributes to epicene pronoun education in Korean EFL settings, and to build awareness in Korean EFL learners regarding the issue of sex bias in language.

This study investigated which type of corrective feedback, direct feedback or indirect feedback, would be more effective for reducing the targeted errors−verb, noun, and determiner errors−in L2 writing. The 20 Korean EFL college students were divided into two feedback conditions: direct feedback and indirect coded feedback. The results of the study showed that only the errors in the noun category, not the other two categories, showed a significant decrease over time. There were no significant differences in the effect of the differential feedback. The post surveys and interviews revealed that the students in both groups had difficulty in understanding their errors and feedback on them, and they wanted to receive a more detailed explanation about their errors in order to fully understand them. The overall findings indicate that different types of corrective feedback need to be combined with other methods such as a one-to-one conference or mini-lesson for further helping students understand their errors and reduce other errors in the future. This study provides L2 teachers with valuable information on how to respond more effectively to the needs of L2 learners.

According to Shohamy (2007), the tests of certain languages deliver messages and ideologies about the prestige, priorities and hierarchies of the languages, leading to policies of suppression of diversity. The test-driven language policies also lead to a narrow view of language as standardized and homogenous. The purpose of this paper is to contextualize English language tests in relation to language policy tools in Korea. The discussion of inappropriately used test-driven policies was supported by several test development cases in Korea, which appeared in newspaper articles, testing companies’ newsletters, or government documents. Different English language tests intended as language policy tools were categorized into three major situations: government-led, school-contextualized, and industry-based. It was argued that the English test-driven policy movement must have influenced teaching, learning, and the curriculum, to the extent that policy-making and testing essentially became synonymous.

In order to ascertain the extent to which Korean college students are familiar with the proper use of the English comma, this study examined all the instances of the comma used in a learner corpus consisting of 787 compositions written by Korean college students. All in all, 5,869 tokens of comma errors were identified and subsequently grouped into five categories of errors: (a) omission, (b) addition, (c) wrong substitution, (d) wrong position, and (e) others. A careful examination of these five types of comma errors revealed that the number of tokens in omission was the highest among the five categories, accounting for over half of all the comma errors, and that the students who received higher scores on their essays were just as likely to make comma errors as those who scored lower, a fact which suggests that students with a higher procifiency of English also need instruction on using the comma properly. These results lead to the conclusion that most Korean students are not familiar with contextual uses of the comma and that teaching the comma should be incorporated into English education both at the secondary and at the tertiary level.

This study explores cross-linguistic differences in online sentence production, working on the theory that the grammatical characteristics of a language customize the speakers’ usual manner of sentence construction and utterance. It is reasoned that a contrast between English and Korean syntax has a direct bearing on that process: The sentential subject is licensed by a tensed verb in English, while it is by an overt morpheme in Korean. This gives rise to a substantial difference in the speakers’ speech patterns: English speakers’ message formation and linguistic encoding center on a verb, while Korean speakers elect or utter a subject first and then draw a predicate. An experiment is conducted on the hypotheses that (a) English L1 speakers are disposed to make sentences based on verbal information, so they would choose a subject that is conceptually more intimate with a given verb; (b) In contrast, Korean L1 speakers’ sentence construction is topic-oriented, so they would first consider the contextual properties of each referent such as shared familiarity and previous topicality; (c) Korean speakers’ L1 patterns would be persistent in their L2 English processing. The results and some implications for English teaching are discussed.

This study intends to investigate the needs of study skills for English of Korean postgraduate engineering students in an academic community. In raising the issues, this research uses semi-structured interview to examine the perceptions of Korean engineering students themselves and subject lecturers. The research showed that expanded command of study skills in English integrated with academic practices of the engineering discipline was seen to be required for students in the community. Considering the demands of participation in the global academic community leads to the conclusion that the practice of EAP teaching should encompass integrative forms of literacy along with the particular academic culture and conventions of the engineering discipline.

This study aimed to investigate characteristics of English summary skills of Korean college freshmen. To achieve this aim, 120 English summary writings were collected from an English diagnostic test for college freshmen. Two texts with different features were used for the test. Text A is a persuasive essay with a problem/solution structure, and Text B is an expository essay with a collective structure. Fifty-three students summarized Text A and the others Text B. For each of the text groups, students were classified into two groups by their summary level. In the analysis of the writings considering the genre of the original text, organization, and adherence to summarization rules, it was found that the learners summarized the persuasive essay better than the expository essay. The high-ability group used various transition words and followed the structure of the original text when they organized their writings. As for summarization rules such as invention, selection, and paraphrasing, Text A group did not show any difference in their creation skill of topic sentence between the high- and low-ability group. On the other hand, the high-ability group that read Text B was better at creating general sentences than the low group. There was not a significant difference between the high- and low-ability groups in their paraphrasing skills, Text A group in general performing better than Text B group. Further suggestions and pedagogical implications are discussed.

A continuing challenge for English educators and policy makers in Korea is how to provide the right amount of good English education in an effective and efficient way, to help achieve the needed level of English communication skills. No efforts would turn out successful if the amount and the quality of public English education did not meet people's expectations. In order to plan and implement successful English education policies, it is necessary to figure out what kind of English education and how much of it are needed for Korean people. The current study aims to investigate what levels of English speaking proficiency Korean people perceive they need. The study first reviews some widely-used international English oral proficiency standards, then, compares those with the level descriptions of the Korea’s national curriculum of English. To gather information on the current level of English speaking proficiency, and the expected level of English speaking proficiency, 356 teachers (123 elementary school, 114 middle school, 119 high school), 696 students (179 elementary school, 222 middle school, 295 high school), and 650 parents (164 elementary, 212 middle school, 274 high school) from all the 16 district education authorities, were surveyed and interviewed. The results are presented with the discussion of the future directions of English education in Korea.

This study reports on the findings of a corpus-based analysis of Korean college students' use of English conjunctive adjuncts. Unlike many previous studies that mainly focused on describing the position and semantic types of conjunctions used by learners of English, this study examines grammatical errors of conjunctive adjuncts found in a leaner corpus that consists of 102,632 words written by 399 Korean college freshman students. The main findings of the study can be summarized as follows. First, learners tend to use sentence-initial coordinators even when the sentences before and after the coordinators are not long enough to warrant such usage. Second, sentence fragments occur much more frequently than run-on sentences with the 10 most frequent conjunctive adjuncts found in the corpus. Finally, learners often add unnecessary punctuation marks or omit necessary ones after conjunctive adjuncts, errors which sometimes make it difficult for readers to understand the text. All these errors amount to the conclusion that many Korean learners of English at the university level lack the necessary grammatical knowledge of English conjunctive adjuncts to use them correctlyin academic writing.

This study aimed to investigate Korean high school students’ comprehension level and attitudes towards three different English accents: American-accented, Malaysian-accented, and Korean-accented English. The experiment was conducted with 340 female high school students in Gyeongsangnam-do. The data collection in this study consisted of the results of three listening comprehension tests and two survey questionnaires. The results show that speakers' various English accents affected the participants’ listening comprehension: The participants understood the American-accented and the Korean-accented English better than the Malaysian-accented English. The study also shows that there is no interaction between the English accents and the participants' L2 listening proficiency levels. In addition, the results indicate that the participants display more positive attitude toward American-accented English, followed by Malaysian-accented English, and finally Korean-accented English. This paper therefore suggests that Korean students need to be exposed to various English accents in order to become familiar with the concept of World Englishes.