The present study examines the effects of manipulating cognitive task complexity on high school English learners’ narrative and persuasive writing. Participants were 156 high school students. They were divided into four groups. Each group was given one of four different types of writing that were classified based on their genres (narrative vs. persuasive writing) and dimensions of task complexity (resource-directing vs. resource-dispersing). All participants completed both simple and complex writing tasks for their assigned type of writing. Participants’ written products were measured in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The results revealed that increased task complexity, along with the resource-directing dimension, somewhat positively affected the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of both narrative and persuasive writing. However, increased task complexity, along with the resource-dispersing dimension, showed differential effects of cognitive complexity on participants’ written products between the genres. It resulted in decreased scores in fluency and accuracy, and had no significant impact on the complexity of narrative writing. As for persuasive writing, on the other hand, it lowered the fluency, increased the complexity, and had no impact on the accuracy. The pedagogical suggestions drawn from the results are provided along with the limitations of the study.

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.

The purpose of this study was to develop English writing instruction models in order to improve 1st grade high school students’ writing ability under the communicative framework. A writing pattern ‘describing pictures and making an inference’ was utilized to develop writing instruction models and lesson plans. In order to accommodate a wider range of teachers’ needs in high school, the study took into consideration two teaching conditions, learner proficiency levels (high, mid, and low) and skill integration (listening, writing, and reading, writing) in the development process. A total of five English writing instruction models and lesson plans for different teaching conditions were developed using two chapters extracted from two textbooks. The characteristics of the newly developed models and lesson plans were provided so that teachers can easily modify them for their own needs in the practice. Further, the writing pattern ‘describing pictures and making an inference’ turned out to be quite adaptable to real teaching conditions and seemed to contribute to enhancing students’ creativity as well as their writing skills. At the end, study limitations were discussed.

This study has focused on the two factors. The first things has investigated the way the Korean L2 learners apply the pattern of ‘adverb+ verb collocation’ in English to their ‘opinion paragraph writing’ on the topic sentences, with the focus on two factors: meta-discourse perspective on the genre of paragraphs and the writers’ strategies for selecting particular collocation types. Second element with the findings of the first step has suggested the effective writing methods for the Korean L2 learners. From 15th October to 2nd November, 2018, the researchers had examined the L2 learners’ topic sentences shown as in the their first drafts, to identify the attitude (I agree), engagement (consider) markers or self-mentions (I, We) and boosters (completely, fully, strongly, etc.) in meta-discourse resources which were founded on the types of essays. We had proposed that the learners would produce proper English ‘adverb+verb’ collocations based on the semantic features for verbs and adverbs in English and Korean with the feedback comments. Secondly, the researchers had reanalyzed the learners’ final products which have been focused on the learners’ self-correction for the deviant English-Korean collocations or non-collocation in English. The researchers had found out some pedagogical implications which had suggested for learning the suitable English collocation usage based on the findings of the study. The major thing has shown that the learners would depend on the meta-discourse resources in the process of accepting the academic writing styles or genre. Another implication of the findings is that the new insights into the development of L2 ‘adverb+verb’ collocational competence should be based on the nature of teaching methods that stress input-based or refrain from explicit vocabulary teaching.