This study attempted to examine the relationship between pragmatic transfer and the proficiency level. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to examine the developmental pragmatic competence of Korean learners of Japanese as compared with Japanese native speakers (JNs) and Korean native speakers (KNs). Written complaints were collected from 160 people, composed of 40 JNs, 40 KNs, and 80 Korean learners of Japanese (40 intermediate level and 40 advanced level), and their pragmatic competence was analyzed quantitatively in terms of complaining strategies and the length of their complaints. We found that pragmatic transfer exists at the lower and the higher proficiency levels. But the advanced learners reflect more transfer than the intermediate learners. The results imply that increasing proficiency in the target language can apparently facilitate negative pragmatic transfer.

This paper investigated Korean heritage learners" acquisition of Korean as a second language. In particular, written narratives of 16 Korean heritage learners were analyzed in order to identify errors and strategies observed in Korean heritage learners" second language writing. The findings of the study indicated that learners" errors were not significantly related to their proficiency levels in the target language. Likewise, no significant differences were observed in errors due to their proficiency levels. However, some differences were noted in several grammatical categories. In case- or tense-related areas, learners with higher proficiency levels were not much more accurate than those with lower proficiency levels. However, in terms of the use of inflectional markers, learners with higher proficiency levels exhibited higher accuracy than lower level learners. With regard to their use of strategies, literal translation, code-switching, and approximation were most frequently observed in their writings. The paper concludes with some implications for teaching Korean as a foreign language.

The present study conducted a comparative analysis of use of evaluative adjectives in the essays of Korean EFL learners and native speakers of English. It discussed the characteristics of different types of evaluative adjectives, e.g., frequency, semantic categories, and collocational value of evaluative adjectives. The result of the frequency analysis demonstrates Korean EFL learners’ significant overuse of the limited types of the target items. The analysis of evaluative adjectives by semantic categories shows the similar tendency. For example, the repeated use of a small number of assessment adjectives resulted in the high frequency of adjectives in the assessment category. The present study also demonstrates the collocational associations between the selected evaluative adjectives and intensifiers in the corpus. The descriptive results of the analysis of collocational information indicate that learners employed a less formal/spoken style in the written corpus. As Blagoeva (2004) noted, the differences between the Korean EFL learners and native speakers of English in the characteristics of evaluative expressions might not directly obstruct communication but it is an indication that there is still much to be done in the development of second/foreign language skills.

This study quantitatively investigates foreign learners" acquisition of double particles in Korean. Some of the particles in Korean are jointly used with other particles and some are not, and the sequence of the particles determines the grammaticality of the double particles. Chinese and Japanese learners of Korean participated in the experiment in which they were asked to judge the grammaticality of a combination of a noun and double particles. The participants" judgment of the grammaticality of the double particles and their reaction time for the judgment were analyzed. The results of the study revealed that Japanese learners whose native language has a particle system similar to that of Korean performed better in the grammaticality judgment than Chinese learners whose native language shows no use of double particles. The advanced learners of Korean, regardless of their native languages, showed better judgment on the grammaticality of the use of double particles. This study also found that the type of double particles also affected the learners" judgment and that in the grammaticality judgment of ungrammatical joint of adverbial particles, most of the participants, regardless of their native languages and their Korean proficiency, scored much lower than in the judgment of the other types of double particles. The analyses of the participants" reaction time for the judgment showed congruent results with those of their grammaticality judgement.

The purpose of this article is to show characteristics of complaints of Korean native speakers (KNs), Korean learners (primary, intermediate, and high class) of Japanese language of (KLs), and Japanese native speakers (JNs). When fourteen displeased situations happening occasionally in daily life were given to them, for their complaints about the situations, the degree of complaints and the expression behavior of complaints were investigated. Particularly the complaints by speech act were analyzed with a point of view on the use of strategy and the degree of face-threat (FT). The degree of complaints was higher in order of JNs>KLs>KNs. For the expression behavior of complaints, all of three group (KNs, KLs and JNs) tended to use speech act. For the strategy of complaints and the degree of FT, JNs tended to use strategy of lower degree of FT than that of KN. And KLs showed a tendency of interlanguage which was getting close to targeting language, using strategy of lower FT degree than that of mother language group (KNs) even at a primary class. These results give the following implications for the education of Japanese language for KLs. 1) As the most useful method to resolve the situations of complaints, JNs also use speech act, but JNs recognize the situations more seriously than KNs and their degree of complaints is higher. 2) Nevertheless, JNs are contrasted with KNs by that they would minimize the probable trouble with a person due to their complaints by selecting strategy of low FT degree.

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.

Gardner’s socio-educational model of second language acquisition has received substantial attention from L2 researchers. Several scholars, however, came to question the applicability of the model into foreign language learning (FLL) situations because Gardner’s model was based on studies that have utilized samples selected from Canada, which is presumed to be a typical context of second language learning (SLL). Therefore, the present study investigated the generalizability of Gardner’s socio-educational model into FLL situations by using two samples of Korean learners of English selected from the USA (i.e., ESL sample) and Korea (i.e., EFL sample). To this end, a multi-sample Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis was performed to examine the factorial similarity of Gardner’s model across the ESL and EFL sample. Results of the SEM analysis indicated that the socio-educational model may also hold for learners of L2 in FLL situations. Further multi-sample analysis identified parameters that were not invariant across two samples of Korean learners of English, hence highlighting a call to fine-tune the Attitudes/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) for use in the context of FLL.

This study was designed to examine Korean EFL college students’ expectations about their native-speaking English teachers’ roles and to compare them to those of their instructors. It has also sought gender effect on students’ expectations. Data were collected using a modified version of the Survey of Educational Expectations, developed by McCargar (1993), from 346 students and 34 instructors. The questionnaire included 47 items in 11 domains of English teacher roles: instructional strategies, cultural sensitivity, subject knowledge, warmth, classroom management behaviors, questioning strategies, response to students’ errors, educational approach, teacher-student relationship, organization skills, and teaching methods. Results indicated overall similarities between students’ and teachers’ role expectations, while analyses of individual items showed much greater differences. A clear difference was found in teacher response to student errors. Students expected their native-speaking English teachers to correct their errors, while the teachers clearly disagreed with this expectation of students. The results also showed the gender differences in students’ responses. The findings of the study suggested educational implications to reduce classroom tension and dissatisfaction when there appear student-teacher mismatches in L2 teacher roles.

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.

This paper is a case study of the strategic behaviors of younger Korean students. Three Korean elementary students are examined in this study. An interview was used to collect retrospective verbal data on listening processes as well as listening strategies, and a listening strategy questionnaire was used to gather additional information regarding general listening strategic behaviors. A coded strategy report was tabulated, and the mean and percentage were used to render a strategy profile for each participant. The results of this study revealed that the participants, in most case, used all four groups of strategies: cognitive, compensation, metacognitive and affective strategies. However, they differed in their use of strategies within each group of strategies as well as in how often they used each type of strategies. The differences in the strategic behaviors were closely related to listening proficiency level, text difficulty and listening situation. A highly proficient participant used more strategies compared to less proficient participants. The highly proficient participant typically used top-down strategies more often. In contrast, the less proficient participants used bottom-up strategies more often. They typically relied heavily on familiar words and translation when they listened to a more difficult text. Cognitive strategies were reported the most in the interview and compensation strategies were marked as highest in the LSQ.

This study aims to investigate the effects of various types of input modification on English listening comprehension by Korean high school students. The participants of the study were assigned to three different types of listening input: one time listening, repetitive listening, and elaboration. They listened to five types of genres such as descriptive, narrative, comparison/contrast, causal/evaluation, and problem/solution This study examined how these different types of input and genres affect the students’ listening comprehension in terms of comprehension of main ideas and details, and inference, The results of the study revealed that different types of input modification and repetition influenced the students’ listening comprehension. For instance, repetitive listening and elaboration did not have a significant effect on the high-level students’ listening comprehension, whereas these types of input resulted in improvement in the low-level students’ listening comprehension. In addition, different input types had effects on the students’ listening comprehension according to the students’ proficiency levels. On the basis of the results, some pedagogical implications on the teaching of listening skills are presented.

With the emergence of sociolinguistic approach in second language learning, instructors have begun to acknowledge the native language (L1) as a legitimate tool with the potential to facilitate second language (L2) learning mainly in output-based tasks. This study focuses on how the use of L1 by L2 learners affects their task achievement. Two communicative tasks were used, and tasks were carried out by 32 high school students in L2 only, or in L1 and L2 during group test sessions held on different days. Tape-recorded transcripts of learners when performing the tasks, interviews, and questionnaires were collected and analysed to investigate effect on the use of L1. The findings suggest that during performing the tasks, learners used their L1 to complete their tasks for a variety of functions. Through the L1, they explained and negotiated the task each other, or checked their understanding or compared answers to the task against their peers. To allow the learners to use of their L1 was even more effective than to urge them to use L2 only in a foreign language class using task. Further investigation indicates that, if one of goals of output-based introduction is considered as the successful completion of the task, the learners’ use of L1 may be beneficial to attain the goal when performing completely in L2 is impossible or beyond the learners’ linguistic ability.