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.

This study explored if and to what extent foreign language high school students would benefit from participating in a school English drama contest in terms of English proficiency, affective attitudes, and collaborative competence. For this purpose, questionnaires were constructed to measure students’ perception of their growth in those areas after participating in the contest. Pre- and post-questionnaires were administered to 85 students, and in-depth interviews were conducted with 13 of the survey respondents. In a comparison of the pre- and post-test measures, the study found that the drama contest contributed to reducing students’ anxiety and enhancing their intrinsic motivation. Although pre- and post-test differences in language proficiency and collaborative competence were found to be non-significant, the participants addressed positive aspects of their experience in the contest. For example, they reported that they improved their pronunciation, speaking, and writing skills and that they collaborated and learned from one another by sharing ideas, providing feedback, and exchanging opinions.

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.