In light of the expanding use of technology in education, we attempted to analyze how Korean college students perceived the use of Machine Translation (MT) tools in the classroom. Specifically, this study attempted to explore students’ perceptions of their ability to use MT tools and to measure the reliability of the MT-generated output, along with measuring students’ general sense of confidence in English learning. This research analyzed 183 EFL college students’ responses to an online survey, and a one-way ANOVA was used to test for the differences in the averages of three groups. The results of data analysis revealed that 1) Among beginners, intermediate learners, and advanced learners, those self-identifying as advanced had the highest scores on all the factors measured.; 2) There was a significant mean difference in students’ perceptions of the ability to use MT tools, their beliefs regarding MT’s effectiveness as a learning tool, and affective attitudes towards the use of MT tools between beginner and advanced groups. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications for the effective use of MT tools in the Korean EFL classrooms, and suggestions for future research were presented.

The current study presents a methodology of teaching the connotations and nuances of the word Han (恨) to English-speaking Korean language learners. Since Han (恨) expresses unique and traditional aspects of Korean sensibilities, the goal would be for native English speakers to be able to understand the complexities of its meaning, in spite of the differences in culture background. To this end, research was done into how Han (恨) is translated into English, as there is no term in English with the same meaning. From these findings, a list of Korean vocabulary related to the meaning of Han (恨) was made to show its definitions in English. In addition, a survey was conducted on 42 Americans to find out how English speakers understand Han (恨). As a result of this research, the current study demonstrates the need to teach the meaning of Han (恨) to Korean language learners from English-speaking countries, and suggests a teaching methodology which follows the order of Pre-Class, In-Class and After-Class study based on the Flip-Learning model.

This paper investigates Korean EFL students’ learning (de)motivation factors according to the level of students’ English learning motivation. A total of 41 undergraduate students reflected on their past ten years of English learning experiences and submitted autobiographic essays with ‘motigraph,’ marking their annual changes of English learning motivation from 0 to 10. The data were analyzed with Grounded Theory. The findings revealed that the factors that increased or decreased English learning motivation were different according to students’ level of motivation. Students with low-level motivation were influenced by their teacher or parents, while those with high-level motivation were influenced by their past L2 learning experiences perceived positively by themselves. In both groups, the factors of emotional experiences caused by negative L2 learning experiences were the main reasons for demotivation. This paper emphasizes the importance of subjective appraisal in maintaining students’ L2 learning motivation and recovering from the state of demotivation.

The purpose of this study is to compare the effects of input- and output-based planning (reading a sample passage vs. writing a draft) on the oral performance of L2 learners with low-proficiency. In this study, 16 Korean female junior college students of low English proficiency were divided into two different planning groups. The reading group was required to read a sample passage of the given topic, designed to encourage “noticing” and “focus on form” using input enhancement, while the writing group was asked to write a draft of their speech, using only their own L2 knowledge. After such planning activities, both groups recorded their assigned speaking tasks using Kakao Talk. Eight planning activities and oral performances were completed over the period of the semester. In order to compare the effects of input- and output-based planning on the improvement of overall proficiency, pre- and post-tests, in which the students produced the same narratives, were analyzed using Mann-Whitney U and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. Furthermore, this study explored any difference in speaking performance after each type of planning and what the learners were actually doing during planning time. The results showed that output-based planning had positive effects on speaking performance and its repeated practice led to the improvement of overall proficiency.

This paper explores initiators of humor and the differing characteristics of humor these initiators use in elementary-level English classrooms in Korea. Forty-nine videotaped ordinary classes and interviews with four teachers were investigated. Teachers tended to make learners the subjects of humor, with this type of humor attracting students to participate in learning. Furthermore, teachers encouraged learners to pay more attention to the form of English language features by humorously revealing mispronunciations or expressions that learners could easily make mistakes with. Additionally, among learners, the primary users of humor were middle- to lower-level students. Teachers needed to build a safe environment for English underachievers who unintentionally made humorous mistakes so that they would not be mocked. Also, certain boys intentionally tried humor to get attention. It is noteworthy that teachers and learners jointly constructed humor by supporting each other. This conjoint humor reaffirms the importance of teachers’ reactions and attitudes towards pupils. By listening attentively and accepting learners’ remarks, teachers could make humorous, meaningful interactions. The current paper projects some pedagogical implications concerning how to use or deal with humor for foreign language teachers.

The study investigates the effects of corpus-based formulaic sequences learning on developing learners’ writing skills and attitudes. For this purpose, fifty-four high school students participated in the study and were divided into two groups. The experimental group learned formulaic sequences with the corpus-based method, while the control group learned the target items through the definition-centered method. The results of the study showed that no significant difference in writing ability was found between corpus-based formulaic sequences learning and traditional formulaic sequences learning. The corpus-based formulaic sequences learning showed a greater effect on improving grammatical accuracy of writing. The traditional formulaic sequences learning was effective in the acquisition of productive knowledge of formulaic sequences. The results of the survey questionnaire showed that the students showed a positive attitude toward corpus-based formulaic sequences learning, which may mean corpus-based learning can play an important role in increasing students’ motivation. These results may suggest that various corpus-based activities for EFL class need to be developed.

The purpose of this research study is to identify the perceptions of both primary ELL(English Language Learner)s and English teachers on MMP(Multimodal Media Production)-embedded English instruction at a primary English class. In order to answer this question, 182 primary ELLs and 2 English teachers participated in this research. A questionnaire survey was administered to the focal participants and an open-ended interview was conducted with the teachers. The results show that overall perceptions on MMP were comparably high among ELLs, and there was significant difference between genders, grades and English levels in terms of learning interest. The teachers’ interview revealed that MMP would trigger deeper understanding of the lesson and ELLs’ voluntary active class participation by heightening motivation, self-confidence and interest in learning English. In sum, the implementation of MMP-embedded English instruction has positive pedagogical effects for young ELLs since it may promote essential literacy skills in the 21st century as well as help in affective domains.

In the era of the 4th industrial revolution, creativity plays a pivotal role in the competitiveness of a country. The importance of creativity education therefore cannot be overemphasized. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of discussion-based English reading and writing activities on Korean high school students' creativity, English writing, and self-assessed creative thinking. The participants were 45 high school students in Seoul, Korea. They were divided into two groups: the discussion-based English reading and writing group (n=24) and the traditional English instruction group (n=21). The experiment was administered during two semesters of the 2017 academic year. The major findings are as follows: First, the experimental group showed significant improvement on the creativity test, especially in the areas of fluency, flexibility, and original thinking. Second, the experimental group outperformed the control group on the writing test. Third, the experimental group showed positive changes in their self-assessed flexible thinking, convergent thinking, and intrinsic motivation. All of these indicate the beneficial effects of the discussion-based English reading and writing activities. Based on the results, some pedagogical suggestions were made for the effective integration of creativity education into the teaching of English as a foreign language.

This study investigated the relative effects of input-based versus output-based activities on the learning of English unaccusative constructions. A total of 73 high school students were randomly assigned into two experimental groups and one control group. Of the two experimental groups, the input-based input enhancement group (IE group) experienced a reading passage with the learning targets visually enhanced. The output-based dictogloss group (DG group) performed the dictogloss task with the identical passage given to IE group. The control group (CG group) did not experience the learning targets at all. Results showed that IE group statistically significantly outperformed CG group both at the immediate and the delayed posttests, while there was no significant difference between IE group and DG group. In terms of the generalizability of the learned knowledge, however, it was DG group that outperformed CG group at the immediate posttest. Again, there was no difference between IE group and DG group. More detailed findings are provided, along with some implications for English classrooms in Korea.

This study investigated predictors of reading comprehension in elementary school English learners. The study specifically examined the role of word recognition and oral language skills in their reading comprehension levels. Participants were 206 students in grades four, five, and six, and they completed measures of letter naming, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, decoding, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, correlation, and multiple regression. Findings showed that there were significant differences between performances of the 4th graders and the other two grade groups on all measures, indicating a possible ceiling effect in the acquisition of basic reading skills by upper-grade students. Oral language, indexed by oral vocabulary and listening comprehension, emerged as the more powerful predictor of reading comprehension as compared to word recognition skills. In addition, the contribution of word decoding tended to decrease across grade levels; whereas oral vocabulary explained more variance in upper grades.

An, Soyoung. 2018. “An Analysis of University Students' English-Learning Motivation Change through Portfolio Assessment”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(1). 251~275. This study aims to analyze university students' English-learning motivation through making a learning portfolio. I conducted an experiment to know whether motivation could be changed by different assessment systems, a result-oriented assessment and a process-oriented assessment. First, there were no statistically significant differences in English-learning motivation between the two groups subject to a result-oriented assessment and a process-oriented assessment by independent T-test. Second, the variable “attitudes toward learning English” significantly changed when students created a learning portfolio by paired T-test. Students showed their preferences for studying English through an authentic learning portfolio method. Therefore, even though the new assessment system such as a portfolio assessment brings us innovation, the assessment system had a partial impact on students' English-learning motivation.

The present study explored usage patterns of English coordinating conjunctions(CCs) in Korean EFL learners' and native English speakers' written corpus. Focusing on the morpho-syntactic use and cohesive functions of and, but, or and so as focal examples in academic prose, both quantitative and qualitative analyses were employed. Findings from the quantitative analysis of the opinion essays showed that both groups used and most frequently, which is used mostly in word/phrase levels rather than in clause levels. On the other hand, so is especially used as a clause-level CC. Because or and and used most frequently in word/phrase levels are recognized easily as CCs, they rarely appear in a sentence-initial position. By contrast, so and but used more often in a clause level appear in a sentence-initial position more frequently, which may lead L2 learners to confuse CCs with connective adverbials(CAs). Based on the Subset Principle, it may be interpreted that morpho-syntactic properties on CAs in Korean transfer to those on English CCs due to the morpho-lexical difference of CCs between the two languages. However, this study reveals that the L1 transfer seems to gradually retreat at an intermediate level where L2 learners start to perceive the registers of academic prose.

As a preliminary study for the effective development of a genre-focused English learner corpus, this article aims to investigate most frequent error types and their frequencies in English emails written by undergraduate freshmen in South Korea. Data for this study include English emails of 86 Korean students majoring in humanities or social science in a university located in Daegu. With the rise of Internet, ESL/EFL education has witnessed a growing interest in teaching email usage in composition courses, as it provides a variety of opportunities to evaluate language abilities including interpersonal and pragmatic abilities. The present article revealed that the most frequent error type was concerned with style, such as capitalization (28.7%) and punctuation (7.8%), which was followed by determiner deletion (6.3%), genre convention such as closing (3%), countability of nouns (3%), and verb choice (2.7%). Different error types and frequencies were identified according to different English proficiency levels (Korean SAT and TOEIC), which evidenced the need to include the English proficiency level annotation in the corpus design and to focus on different types of errors in class in accordance with learners’ proficiency levels.

The purpose of this study is to investigate in-depth high school students’ strategy use in reading English texts of College Scholastic Ability Test (KSAT). This study employed a think-aloud method to look into the reading process by task types and by reading proficiency. Six high school students, three high-level and three low-level readers, were asked to perform reading tasks of three types, ‘finding a theme’, ‘filling the gap’, ‘finding an irrelevant sentence & inserting a sentence’, thinking out loud after training. The results are as follows. First, the participants used varied types of reading strategies regardless of top-down/bottom-up. ‘Guessing from the context’ and ‘paraphrasing in L1’, were most frequently used, and ‘using schema’ and ‘sensing the logical organization’ were least used.’ Second, different strategy use patterns were shown by task types: Far more strategies were used in ‘finding a theme’ than the others, especially, attending to keyword. Third, the high-level readers employed more reading strategies than the low-level counterparts. Furthermore, the strategy use pattern was very different between groups: The low-level readers seldom used ‘checking discourse markers,’ ‘synthesizing information,’ and ‘questioning’ that the high level readers commonly used.

This study mainly explores the research themes and topics of corpus-based studies published in English Teaching in an attempt to provide future directions and pedagogical implications in this research domain. For the purposes of the study, a total of 42 corpus-based research articles published in English Teaching were reviewed and analyzed in terms of research topics, methodology, and characteristics of the corpora employed in the studies. The thematic and topical analysis of the corpus-based studies showed that much research, i.e., 64%, has focused on the analysis ofvocabulary items. Further, the analysis of the research methods revealed that corpus-based studies published in English Teaching mainly employed quantitative methods to describe frequency and distribution information of the target linguistic items. It also provided the description of the characteristics of the corpora adopted in the corpus-based research. Interestingly, many corpus-based studies published in English Teaching focused on the analysis of the learner corpus data. The paper discusses the future research directions and pedagogical implications for corpus-based studies on TEFL.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of research on learner factors in second language acquisition by reviewing relevant studies published in English Teaching over the past 50 years. A total of 182 articles on various learner factors were extracted from the journal. Further detailed analyses were conducted on 110 articles on strategy, motivation, and personality traits in terms ofpublication year, research topics, participants, methods, and researchers' concentration. The results reveal that research on learner factors has significantly expanded over time in terms of volume and diversity, reflecting increasing research interests in the field. As for research methodology, a quantitative approach was far more frequent but qualitative and mixedmethod approaches have gained visibility since 2000. Yet, most of the studies focused on tertiary level learners, while overall neglecting primary and secondary level learners. Furthermore, individual researchers' interests in the factors looked rather sporadic as revealed in the lack of research concentration. Based on the findings, suggestions for future research on learner factors are made.

Willingness To Communicate (WTC) is one's volition to enter into communication at a particular time with a specific person or persons using an L2. Despite the growing interests about WTC in ESL and EFL context, there is little research done in the Korean EFL classroom context with young learners. This study investigated variables affecting WTC of young Korean EFL learners in regular English classes. A total of 149 fifth graders participated in the study. Data were analyzed using factor and correlation analysis, cross-tabulation, and the ANOVA. The results confirmed the consensus about the positive correlation of competence and the negative correlation of apprehension to WTC. The most powerful predictor of WTC was communication with the native teacher and the second was prohibition of L1. There were partial statistical differences of WTC, Frequency of Communicative Behavior, and Self-Perceived Communicative Competence according to the age of onset, the amount of studying, and the length of stay in English speaking countries.

이 연구는 역진행 상호학습 프로그램을 교수·학습 과정 및 평가에 적용하여 영어 의사소통능력을 신장시키고자 하는데 목적이 있다. 영어과 교육과정에서 영어 의사소통 능력을 길러 주는 것이 중요한 목표이지만, 인성교육과 창의성 교육도 중요하게 생각하여 영어 교육을 통한 인성 함양을 강조하고, 교수-학습 방법에서도 창의성 계발이나 인성 교육을 고려한 교수-학습 계획 수립을 강조하고 있다. 그러나 현실은 교과서 위주 수업으로 소통이 단절되거나 학생과 교사간의 1:1 소통만이 겨우 이루어지는 경우가 빈번하다. 이러한 점들을 고려하여 학습자 중심의 학습, 배움이 중심이 되고 학생 개개인의 수준과 특성을 고려할 수 있는 역진행 상호학습(Flipped Learning)을 실천하여 학생들의 영어 의사소통 능력을 신장시키고자 한다.

This study investigates the effects of collocation task types on Korean high school students' collocation learning and learning attitudes. A total of 118 Korean high school students participated in the experiment, and they were divided into four groups: control group, receptive treatment group, productive treatment group and combination treatment group. In order to investigate the effects of collocation task types on students' English proficiency, each group of students was classified into a high proficiency group and a low proficiency group. The students took a pre-test before the experiment and a post-test after the experiment. After the post-test, the post-questionnaire survey was conducted to examine the students' learning attitudes. The results of the study were as follows: (1) The three types of collocation tasks were effective in learning receptive and productive collocations; (2) in the delayed retention test, it was revealed that the effect of the three types of collocation tasks on both receptive and productive collocation learning lasted; and (3) the result of post-questionnaire survey showed that learning collocation through collocation tasks had positive influence on most students in terms of raising their interest and increasing their self-confidence.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of two different types of vocabulary activities on Korean EFL learners’ vocabulary learning and perceptions. The participants of the study were 30 Korean middle school students in Seoul, and they were divided into two groups (typography and web-based authoring). The former employed the word meaning and spelling image association technique and the latter used a multimedia vocabulary authoring tool for 42 target words. The major findings of the study are as follows: (1) Both the typography and the web-based vocabulary authoring groups showed significant improvement on the posttest of vocabulary test, which indicated the equal effectiveness of the two vocabulary activities; (2) with respect to different English proficiency levels, the low-level group showed much higher improvement of the mean difference between pre and post tests than the higher group; and (3) the participants’ perceptions turned out to be more positive when they participated in creating English word spelling image than authoring multimedia vocabulary learning materials. The results suggest the beneficial effects of active student involvement in the vocabulary learning process. Pedagogical and practical suggestions are made on the effective teaching of English vocabulary in Korean classroom settings.