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 present study examines English loanwords appearing in a Korean television drama, Start-up, to understand how English is incorporated into Korean discourse in the settings of everyday life. Data analysis revealed that the drama contains a relatively high number of English loanwords presumably due to the protagonists' young age and the tech-based start-ups that it features. One of the distinct characteristics of English loanwords in their forms is the extensive use of ‘English-hada’ words and other types of words combining Korean and English elements. In addition, the use of English often extends beyond the word level to phrases or even sentences. The functions of English loanwords in the drama were found to fill a lexical gap in the Korean language, strengthen the sense of belonging and bonding among the members of a particular generation or group, create a humorous atmosphere, and symbolize professional competence and thus an elevated level of the speakers' social status.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between high school students’ use of vocabulary learning strategies and their motivation. Its main concern is with how the relationship varies between three student groups divided according to their vocabulary achievement. A survey was taken by a total of 275 students enrolled in a high school in Gyeonggi province. 232 students were selected to be studied. The students were divided into three groups - advanced, intermediate, and beginner levels - based on their performance in vocabulary tests. Their responses were analyzed through SPSS to produce both basic descriptive and inferential statistics. The results show the three groups differ regarding which strategies both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation had a significant impact on - these were memory and cognitive strategies for the advanced level group; decision, social, memory and metacognitive strategies for the intermediate level group, and none for the beginner level group. The results also show that the three groups differ regarding which strategies only extrinsic or intrinsic motivation had a significant impact on.

This paper analyses the lexical verbs in the guided word list of the 2015 Revised English Curriculum and high school English textbooks on the basis of the high frequency 200 lexical verbs extracted from the core academic words in the Corpus of Contemporary American English [COCA]. Lexical verbs are key words in determining sentence structures and meanings. In particular, this research focuses on academic verbs the knowledge of which is important for EFL learners’ academic achievement. The following questions are dealt with in this paper: 1) What changes occur in the distribution of high frequency core academic verbs in the guided word list? 2) Which verbs are classified as career development and technical words? 3) What are the properties of the academic verbs used in the high school textbooks of <English>, <English I> and <English II> in terms of frequency? and 4) With regard to EFL learners’ vocabulary learning, why should we be concerned with academic verbs classified as elementary-level words? The findings reveal that 35% of the 200 core academic verbs are used in the series of high school English textbooks, which means that a thorough learning of the general lexical verbs is important from a pedagogical perspective in the EFL situation. Furthermore, a diverse use of more core academic verbs is required in high school English textbooks.

The purpose of the present study is to analyze needs of graduate students for English education for their academic study. Online survey was administered to all the graduate students in a university located in Seoul, Korea, and a total of 1,241 students participated in this study. The participants varied in majors including humanities and social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, medicine, and so forth. Crosstab analyses were performed in order to analyze the survey data, followed by subordinate analyses by the participants’ majors. Results indicated that most students perceived the great importance of English for their study, and ‘listening’ and ‘speaking’ were found to be the most difficult areas when students take English-medium graduate courses. In addition, although the frequency of scholarly activities varied by majors, most of the students expressed difficulties in writing research papers and making presentations. Based on the results, the present study suggests that English education programs be expanded and opened in order to meet the different needs by the students’ academic majors.

With the advent of mobile technology, teaching and learning have been more effective with the help of smartphone education applications. This study investigates the effects of vocabulary learning using the smartphone education applications on Korean elementary school learners’ English vocabulary learning and attitudes. A total of fifty-seven elementary school students in the 5th grade participated in the study and were randomly divided into an experimental and a control group. The results of the study manifested that both the experimental and control group showed an increase in the comprehension and production score from pre- to post-tests. The effects of the long-term vocabulary learning, however, were not found to be statistically significant. The average score in the delayed test for both groups slightly increased, which indicated that the treatment was beneficial for learners’ long-term memory enhancement. In the affective domain, interests and confidence ratings were significant for the upper-level experimental and lower-level control group. The results of the survey questionnaire showed that the vocabulary learning using direct examples and pictures for both groups was helpful to improve learners’ lexical competence.

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.

Moon, Hyun-Hee. 2017. “Changes of English Company Names in KOSPI: From the 1940s to the Mid-2010s”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(1). 53~83. This study aimed at investigating to what extent, in what ways, and for what purposes English has been used in Korean company names from the 1940s to the mid-2010s. Of those registered in KOSPI (the Korea Composite Stock Price Index) in July 2014, 165 companies with English names were chosen for the study. In order to grasp longitudinal trends, the linguistic composition of original names and subsequent name-changes were analyzed. The results demonstrate that Korean was the dominant language of company names between the 1940s and the 1970s, while English gained popularity in the 1980s and since then, consolidated its position as the most attractive lexical source. A Single word was the first form applied to English names, followed by a compound and an acronym. Since the 1990s, more complex forms combining clipping and blending have been widely employed, diversifying word formation types. Parts of speech, once limited to nouns, adjectives, and verbs, have later broadened to include articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. The major reason for the influx of English names is the positive images of English which connect them with being modern, global, progressive, future-oriented, and high-tech. The study shows that Korean companies have also discovered a new linguistic advantage of English, which has permitted them to incorporate diverse meanings into their names, and this has played an important role in strengthening the position of English.

Kim, Hyesook. 2014. Corpus-based Study on Gender Differences in the Functions of English Tag Questions. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(3). This study examines gender differences, focusing on the functions of English tag questions using three social variables: age, education, and private/public situations. This research is a corpus-based study which used 753 tag questions extracted from the British component of International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). This paper is the sequel to Kim Hye-Sook(2010), which examined gender differences in the frequency of tag usage. In this present study attention was turned to functions of tag questions to examine whether the gender differences in the tag usage were related to different tag functions. The four functions considered in the study were informational, facilitating, softening and challenging(cf., Holmes 1995; Tottie & Hoffmann 2006). The 753 tags were categorized into those four functions by a native speaker of British English. The tags used by the British men and women in the ICE-GB corpus had no significant gender differences in the functions of tag questions. The tags were used consistently in the order of informational, facilitating, challenging, and softening by both men and women regardless of age, education and private/public situations.

This study investigated how Korean EFL students’ self-directed English learning abilities, learning strategy use, and the relationship between the two constructs change as they advance to upper level schools. Data were collected from 447 elementary, middle, and high school students in Seocho-gu, Seoul, using Self-Directed Language Learning Readiness (SDDLR) and a revised version of Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). The results showed that elementary school students’ SDDLR and SILL scores were significantly higher than those of middle and high school students, with no significant difference between the two groups. Among the learner factors, interest toward English study was the only factor which affected all the three groups’ SDDLR as well as SILL scores. The influence of study-abroad experience and starting age of private education was limited to the elementary school student group, indicating their short-lived effects on self-directed learning and strategy use. Lastly, there was a high or moderately high positive correlation between SDDLR and SILL in all the three groups. However, the specific relationship among subcategories of the two constructs was complicated and different among the three groups.

This study explored the effectiveness and second language (L2) writers' perceptions of process-oriented writing, using portfolio-basedinstruction in a secondary English class at general school settings. The participants were 110 high school students enrolled in a private independent school in Gyeonggi. They learned to produce a four-paragraph-English-essay based on the process-oriented writing methodology, keeping a portfolio note for the entire semester. The instructor was a bilingual teacher of English whose native language is Korean. The 17 weeks' records written in the portfolio note were analyzed to portray whether the approaches enhanced overall performance and understandings about essay-writing. Findings revealed that the participants were satisfied with this approach and improved their writing skills using portfolio-based- instruction. For the sake of implementing the new assessment appropriately at public school settings, further studies are suggested to develop how to enhance classroom environment in order to increase the degree of learner-satisfaction in the essay-writing classes.

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.

This large- scale corpus study examined the gender differences in the use of tag questions in terrns of three different social variables: age, education and private/public situations. Seven hundred and fifty- three tag questions were extracted from the British component of the 1ntemational Corpus of English (ICE -GB), where social variables were parsed and tagged. Overall, women used a slightly higher number of tag Questions: Out of the weighted 5E() tag Questions, men used 'l37 tag Questions (43.1%) and women used 313 tag questions (56.9%). Among men, the number of tag questions increased with age while the number of tag questions decreased with age among women. The women in the 18-25 and 26-45 age brackets used more tag Questions than the men in the same age brackets. But the women older than 45 used fewer tag Questions than the men older than 45. Women with a secondary education used more tag Questions than men with the same education. But both women and men with a tertiary education had about the same frequency of use of tag Questions. 1n the private situations women used more tag Questions than men while in the public situations men used more tag Questions than women

This paper examines variation found in the usage of English relatives by Korean users and learners of English. Two types of data are analyzed using Varbrul analysis: academic articles written by English major professors and compositions by college students majoring and minoring in English. The results of analyses can be summarized as follows: 1) Korean users and learners of English adopt wh-variants more frequently than Americans for use but less commonly than Britons, 2) Advanced English users generally show the usage pattern of English relatives similar to that of native English speakers conditioned by very similar linguistic constraints, 3) Korean English learners with intermediate proficiency level revealed somewhat different patterns of English relative use from those of native English speakers and advanced Korean English users, 4) Prescriptive grammar taught in middle and high schools is analyzed as exerting significant influence on the pattern of English relative use by Korean users and learners of English. (157)

There is little research on the users of dictionaries in Korea. The user research, however, is essential to developing better dictionaries. Hence, this study aims to explore the actual conditions regarding Korean English teachers’ general use of English dictionaries. English teachers were chosen as the subjects because they instruct the use of dictionaries to other users, especially students, as well as use dictionary themselves. Thirty teachers from elementary, middle and high schools respectively (total 90) participated in this research. The research was conducted using questionnaires that consisted of two main parts: The first part was designed to analyze the teachers’ use of dictionaries and the second part aimed to investigate the teachers’ instruction on the use of dictionaries. The data were coded and factors were examined by means of quantitative analysis. It was found that English teachers in Korea used Korean-English and English-English dictionaries which are well structured and easy to use with full contents in order to prepare teaching materials and develop handouts other than text books. In addition, most of teachers said that students must be taught how to use dictionaries in the first grade of junior high school.