The purpose of this study is to compare and analyze the perceptions and attitudes of adult native speakers of Korean and Chinese toward the pronunciation of World Englishes. Fifty-two Korean and 63 Chinese speakers listened to six variations of World Englishes and then completed a questionnaire outlining their perceptions and attitudes toward the different pronunciations. The survey results revealed that Korean adult English learners showed less favorable attitudes toward different pronunciations of World Englishes than Chinese adult language learners did. Korean adult learners preferred American English, but Chinese adult learners preferred Canadian English. Among the three individual variables measured, the first language showed the greatest influence in their responses. The findings of this study imply that, in the context of English education in Korea, it is necessary to raise the awareness of both teachers and learners to the acceptability of World Englishes through exposure to a wide variety of English pronunciations.

Shim, Youngsook. 2014. World Englishes research in Korea, China, and Japan: A meta-analysis of articles published in World Englishes and English Today. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(3). The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of research findings on world Englishes in the context of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese societies, based on an analysis of 89 research articles published in two international journals, World Englishes and English Today, between 2005 and 2014. After a careful review of them, the articles were classified into four important topic areas: the local variety, including language users’ attitudes toward it and its linguistic characteristics (36%); other varieties of world Englishes, with subcategories of perception, education, and intelligibility of those varieties (17%); English use in the given social context, further categorized into descriptive analysis and critical analysis of English use (25%); English teaching and learning, including general EFL teaching/learning topics and English- medium instruction (18%); and others (4%). This paper presents important findings surrounding each topic area and further discusses their sociolinguistic implications and suggests future research direction.

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 14(2). Since the IMF crisis devastated Korea, the tide of globalization has changed every aspect of Korean society. This overwhelming trend of ‘globalization' has been affecting the educational sector, especially in terms of the 'English-learning boom' in Korea. This phenomenon has been criticized by educators because the excessive and reckless expenditure on ‘English-learning' in the private sector has been yielding far-reaching and undesirable effects on society. This paper aims at focusing on the issue of the ‘English-learning boom' of Korea, by analyzing it in terms of a critical discourse analysis. It takes the perspective of post-colonial discourse analysis by criticizing neo-liberalism and social-Darwinism, which are whimpering around Korea with the ideology of globalization. To do so, this paper takes two examples of the ‘English-learning' fever in Korean society: the boom of ‘English village' construction and the anxiety over ‘early exposure to English'. Regarding these two examples, this paper attempts to analyze them in the lens of ‘social symbolization of discourse,' which could explicate the trajectory of how social discourses are idealized, symbolized, represented, and reproduced. This paper argues that the ‘English-learning boom' of Korea is a product of complicated construction of social discourse, which is strongly influenced by the neoliberal ideology of linguistic and cultural imperialism.