This study explored rhetorical devices and their effect on forming coherent and cohesive wholes in the writing of 61 EFL students. When analyzing their writing using the five-paragraph essay format, 57% of students deviated from the format, with some resorting to their L1 rhetorical structures (the indirect group) and others employing rhetorical preferences presumed to be deterministically influenced by their L1 (the hybrid group). Only 43% adhered to the format (the direct group). Neither the indirect nor the hybrid groups were inferior to the direct group regarding the length and quality of the writing; the direct group was not necessarily better received than the other two. The indirect group had a discernible (even if not statistically significant) impact on the length and quality of the writing. The indirect and hybrid groups were found to have slightly stronger control over cohesion indices. The two groups challenged the Englishonly orientation of the five-paragraph essay by negotiating rhetorical structures, thereby doing translingual dispositions.

This study explored how task complexity, writing behaviors (i.e., pausing and revision behaviors), and writing performance (i.e., task completion, coherence and cohesion, language use, and expression and tone) influence and relate to each other. Thirty advanced-level Korean EFL undergraduates completed writing tasks differing in complexity. A combination of keystroke logging and stimulated recall interview was employed. It was found that the simple task group showed a greater number of pauses and revisions related to lower-order writing processes, whereas the complex task group showed longer pauses related to higher-order writing processes. While task complexity had no influence on writing performance, writing behaviors revealed significant relationships with text quality. In the simple task group, pause length and revision were negatively related to writing scores, whereas pause frequency revealed mixed results. In the complex task group, consistent negative relations were found between pausing behaviors and text quality, and fewer revisions were related to better scores in expression and tone.

The present study aims to categorize common word choice errors in Korean EFL writing and help teachers understand students’ word choice patterns. This study reassures that both L1 and its background cultures affect language learners’ choice of vocabulary in English learning. Korean first-year undergraduate students with low levels of English proficiency participated in this study. The students were required to carry out a writing log, a collection of nine pieces of weekly assignments of paragraph writing during the semester. They were allowed to use any type of automatic translation such as Google Translate or Papago for revision and editing. The errors that the students produced were classified into three categories, and significant findings were obtained regarding lexical errors caused by literal translation, cultural differences, and L1 word order. The findings are interpreted in terms of cultural and linguistic differences between the first and target languages. They can give ideas for teachers to instruct EFL writing strategies on students’ word choice errors.

The current study examined the potential contribution of advanced Korean EFL learners’ writing abilities to their reading comprehension abilities. A total of 191 college students participated in this study and were tested on writing and reading comprehension abilities as well as other literacy-related measures including listening comprehension, textreading fluency, and knowledge of vocabulary to control for their effects. In order to account for different aspects of writing and reading comprehension abilities, multiple measures of reading and writing abilities were adopted. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analyses demonstrated that the advanced Korean EFL learners’ English writing abilities had a significant effect on their reading comprehension abilities when other relevant literacy skills were controlled for. Furthermore, their writing abilities mediated the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension abilities. These results highlight the important pedagogical implications on the critical role of writing abilities in enhancing the reading comprehension abilities of L2 learners.

The study investigated if teaching summarizing skills could improve the summary skills of Korean EFL university students. This study involved 38 university freshmen in a required English course and were randomly chosen as the control and experimental groups. The experimental group was taught through summarizing rules, while the control group was engaged in other lessons during the intervention period. The students’ summaries were analyzed as to how effectively the participants paraphrased and integrated the main ideas, the major supporting details, and accurate information from source text into their summaries. The results show that a significant instruction effect was observed in the summary writing performance of the experimental group, in identifying main ideas and major details and paraphrasing and integrating ideas, compared to the control group, which showed a significant change between the first and second summaries only on the accuracy measure. The results are also supported by the questionnaire on students’ perceptions of the instruction.

비고츠스키(Vygosky)의 사회문화 이론은 특히 제2외국어 학습에 있어서 중요한 의미를 갖는다. 학생들은 협동적인 학습 활동을 하면서 영어를 더 잘 배우고 성장하며 발전한다. 게다가 쓰기단계는 사회적 상호작용을 통해 복잡한 인식과정을 거쳐 향상되고 발전한다. 본 논문은 쓰기 수업을 하는 학생들로부터 피드백을 도출하기 위해 구글 독스(Google Docs)를 이용하여 사회문화이론이 쓰기수업에 어떻게 적용되었는지를 설명하고자 한다. 본 연구는 한국 모 대학의 영어수업에서 진행되었고, 참가자는 영어교육과 학생 11명이다. 연구자는 반성적 실천(Reflective Practice), 비계설정(Scaffolding), 동료 피드백 촉진(Peer Feedback Facilitation) 등의 과정을 통해 강사가 학생들이 한 문장에서 시작하여 단락까지 씀으로써 결국은 영어로 에세이를 쓸 수 있게 효과적으로 준비할 수 있었다. 이 연구에서 다섯 단락 정도의 에세이를 쓸 수 있을 만큼 학생들의 작문실 력은 향상되었고, 격려를 통해 서로 성장하고 발전할 수 있었다. 또한 이 과정에서 학생들의 사회적 기술과 공감능력이 향상되었고 수업 분위기도 개선되었다. 이러한 기술적인 동료 피드백은 동기부여를 위한 효율적인 방식이며, 학생들에게는 영어쓰기학습에서 자신감을 주는 것으로 나타난다. 사회문화이론의 적용을 통해 학생들은 제2외국어에 대한 지식을 습득 하고 더 발전시킬 수 있으며, 낮은 단계의 이해에서 더 높은 수준의 지식 으로 나아가게 하는 상호작용의 시너지를 만들어 낸다.

This study explored the effect of writing activity on EFL participants’ speaking performance. In order to attain this purpose, three research questions were presented; 1) What are the characteristics of learners’ writing? 2) How does their speaking fluency change during the writing sessions?, and 3) What is the effect of writing practice on learners’ speaking fluency, in terms of features of spoken grammar? Four college students participated in this study. Pre- and post-oral proficiency test scores, the participants’ writing products, and recorded data of their speaking performance were used for data analysis. Results of data analysis showed that, first, the more proficient participants were, the fewer the errors they made in their writing. Second, there was an increase in scores of intermediate- and beginning-level of students between the pre- and post- oral tests while the scores of advanced level of students did not show any differences between those two tests. Lastly, the result shows that the learners with higher proficiency in writing ability have higher recognition to the spoken grammar. Pedagogical implications are also made on the effective teaching of English writing and speaking in the Korean classroom setting.

The present study aimed at investigating the effects of the two types of teacher feedback―direct corrective feedback (DCF) and metalinguistic explanation (ME)―on the development of EFL learners’ knowledge of the English indefinite article and on their use of it in writing. For this study, 58 college students classified into three groups (two experimental groups and one control group) took the error correction test and performed three writing tasks. The results of the study are 1) there was no group effect of the two types of feedback in the development of their explicit knowledge of the target feature in the test, whereas a time effect was found that their knowledge of the target feature developed significantly after the treatment; and 2) no group differences were found between the two types of feedback in the use of the target feature in the revised writing and among the three writings, though the DCF group outperformed the ME group in the accurate use of the target feature in writing. Theoretical and pedagogical relevance of the findings is addressed.

Literature has been repeatedly recognized as an effective source of authentic materials in EFL classrooms. Literature exposes learners to coherent and expert writing which can enable them to write better and facilitates students’ creative writing skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate the teaching procedures of using short fiction in a Korean high school EFL course in which English writing and reading skills are integrated and to provide pedagogical suggestions for using authentic literature in EFL classrooms. First, this paper introduces a theoretical discussion of the advantages of using short fiction in an English writing instruction, and discusses reasons for selecting the Korean short novel Dongbackkot and the English short story “Araby” as resources for writing. After that pedagogical steps with practical classroom activities are described. We hope that the pedagogical suggestions provided here may inspire English teachers to design their teaching materials using appropriate literary texts to improve their students’ English essay writing and balanced communication skills.

This study examined the language choice for modality patterns to express the degree of probability specifically in email texts based on Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) analytical framework. Participants were students enrolled in an English writing composition course at an online-based Korean university. They were required to write an email thanking their professor, in which they stated their future plans (definite or indefinite) with a degree of probability. The text analysis was compared with two groups of students' scores (high-scoring group n=40 and low-scoring group n=29), based on an assessment of the course assignment. After building up two learner corpora, UAM Corpus Tool version 3.0 was used to analyze the language choice closely using a modality system of the SFG framework. The high-scoring group showed more range and frequency in the use of modal verbs combined with a modal Adjunct or another modal expression. Explicit teaching on the importance of expressing the appropriate degree of probability using a range of modality devices, rather than relying heavily on the primary modality (choice of modal verbs) is highlighted as a pedagogical implication.

This study investigated EFL college students’ culture-related templates of written texts along the possibility of inter-cultural transfer. We designed a case study to explore how certain cultural assumptions contribute to EFL students’ rhetorical decisions while writing an argumentative writing. The participants were four EFL college students. Multiple data sources include background questionnaires, argumentative essays, and in-depth retrospective interviews. To analyze rhetorical choices in the participants’ writing, we identified choices of argumentation subtypes, and introduction and conclusion components. We also categorized the location of the writer’s main claim and thesis statement. The interview data were qualitatively analyzed to see what rhetorical resources participants draw from the cultural/educational contexts, and which factors had influenced the participants’ rhetorical strategy. Data analyses indicate that each participant manipulated different rhetorical structures to strengthen the rhetorical impact of their writing. Indeed, the complex constellation of individual participants’ cultural resources was at play in their L2 writing. This study contributes to our understanding of the rhetorical templates of L2 texts as constructs that are always in process, and therefore adaptable and negotiable.

Lexical richness makes an important contribution to L2 writing quality. To explore its importance, the study aims to identify and explain how lexical richness manifests in argumentative essays written in the final exam of reading and writing class by thirty-five undergraduates. The lexical richness consists of four interrelated elements: lexical diversity, density, sophistication, and fluency. Detailed text analysis can identify these elements in EFL students' academic writing. The correlation analysis showed that the use of lexical diversity, sophistication, and fluency all affect writing quality and can be seen differently in a text depending on different score ranges, vocabulary knowledge and linguistic performance. Further, the regression analysis revealed that the lexical sophistication was found to be the most significant predictor that contributes to writing quality. In sum, the lexical richness displayed in written text is a result of a person’s underlying vocabulary knowledge. This study ends with a pedagogical implication for teaching lexical richness in EFL academic coursework.

The present study examines the usage patterns of stance that constructions in Korean EFL learners' written corpora by two different proficiency groups (KEFL 1, KEFL 2) to figure out some developmental features of marking stance in L2 academic prose. Focusing on three main categories (stance verbs, adjectives, and nouns) controlling stance that clauses, the study compares the frequency of each feature by the categories and their subcategories across the corpora. Employing both quantitative and qualitative analyses, the study found a marked developmental path across the corpora as a cross-sectional study. Indeed, less proficient L2 learners tended to use spoken involvement features as ‘a subjective transmitter’, emphasizing the writer's view only with a private authorial voice. However, more advanced learners showed remarkable features as ‘an objective interpreter’ with more implicitly detached stances. Despite a few chunk expressions considered as being memorized, more complex grammatical resources appropriate for academic discourse were observed. Finally, as the final stage, this study suggests ‘a refined stance-taker’ referring to an expert writer in the academic discourse community, which may be devoid in untrained native speakers' writing. In accordance with the need for university students to transition into more advanced academic discourse sooner, this study provides some practical insights into teaching and learning of stance patterns in using that complement clauses in English academic discourse.

Although the use of Grammatical Metaphor (GM) has been regarded as one of the representative features of academic writing in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), not many studies have explored its role in second or foreign language writers’ writing quality. This study aimed to discover the potential relationship between GM development and argumentative writing quality of advanced Korean EFL learners, while controlling for their overall language proficiency and reading comprehension ability. The findings from this study unveiled significant contribution of the use of both premature and mature GM and also identified transcategorization as the specific GM that has relatively stronger predictability of writing quality. The results from current research yield meaningful pedagogical implications for writing instruction in Korean EFL contexts.

In argumentative writing, writers are expected to use hedged expressions and stance devices through specific linguistic expressions to convince their proposition effectively. Yet little research attention has been paid to whether the inclusion of such devices is related to the overall quality of second or foreign language learners’ argumentative writing. In this study, hedges and stance devices that are included in 28 advanced Korean EFL writers’ argumentative writing were analyzed to identify their potential relation to the overall writing quality. Analyses demonstrated that although hedges and stance devices were related to argumentative writing quality in general, the specific linguistic forms that predicted two different aspects of writing quality – formal and content quality – were different. Specifically, hedges played a significant positive role in only content quality of writing, and the specific stance devices that significantly predicted formal quality did not contribute to the content quality, and vice versa. The findings from this study provides important pedagogical implications for EFL writing instruction.

We explored whether task complexity, operationalized by the two types of writing prompts, affects EFL high school students’ narrative writing in terms of syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, fluency, cohesion, and text quality. 32 intermediate EFL students who were randomly assigned to two prompt groups completed a written narrative task based on a series of sixteen pictures. Task complexity was operationalized as a bare versus frame prompt. The results indicate that the task complexity had an impact on lexical sophistication measures. The students in the framed prompt group were able to include more sophisticated vocabulary in their narratives than those in the bare prompt group. The findings are discussed in terms of the Limited Attentional Capacity Model in that the students in the bare prompt group might have prioritized meaning rather than form in order to ease attentional overload. The findings of our study could assist teachers in selecting writing prompts that have the potential to elicit the targeted features of writing performance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate error patterns in EFL college students’ English writing as well as their change over time, based on the teacher’s feedback. In order to accomplish this purpose, two research questions were constructed; first, what are the characteristics of Korean EFL students’ writing based on the maturity of English sentence by the T-unit analysis? Second, what types of error patterns are produced in Korean EFL students’ writing? Also, how do the error patterns change based on the teacher’s feedback over time? The participants were four Korean EFL college students, and they were asked to pre-write, draft, revise and edit until they completed their final draft. The results of pre- and post-writing test were also analyzed. The major findings are as follows: 1) The mean number of T-unit among participants was 42.25 units, and the mean number of words per T-unit was 10.95 words. 2) The most frequently committed errors were found out as lexical and morphological errors. Moreover, the rate of lexical and sentence structure errors has been dropped, whereas the rate of punctuation errors has increased as the teacher’s feedback progressed over time. Pedagogical and practical suggestions are also made on the effective teaching of English writing in Korean classroom settings.

Park, Yong-Yae. 2018. “Advice Receiving in College EFL Writing Tutorials”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(1). 159~200. This paper explores interactional practices observed in advice receiving by the tutees in college EFL writing tutorials within the framework of conversation analysis. The data for the study include 24 audio-recorded writing tutorial sessions at a university in Korea. The findings indicate three types of advice receiving: 1) advice receiving with marked acknowledgments using a:: (‘oh’) to mark the advice to be informative and newsworthy; 2) advice receiving with unmarked acknowledgments; and 3) advice resisting. Advice resisting can be further divided into three types, that is, (1) making excuses, (2) complaining, and (3) disagreeing. In the first two types of advice resisting, the tutors' advice deals with various problematic areas in the tutee's writing, and the tutees resist advice by pointing out their inability to do what is advised or complaining about the complexity of the task. The third type, disagreeing, takes place when the tutees resist the tutors' advice on vocabulary choices. These resisting patterns seem to differ from those observed elsewhere (cf, Heritage and Sefi 1992) and reflect the nature of the tutorials and the particular tutees in this study. Finally, the study suggests some pedagogical implications on EFL learning and tutor training.

Ko, Bo-Ai. 2018. “Thematic Patterns in Formal Email Writing of Korean EFL College Learners”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(1). 31~59. This study explores the Theme types and the thematic progression in the formal email writings of Korean EFL college learners, based on the Theme-Rheme analytical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). Data was collected from 99 college students, enrolled in an English Writing Composition course during the second semester of 2017 via a cyber university in Korea. Their main writing activity involved email writings in the form of requesting primarily based on the Genre Approach. Text analysis was conducted with the comparison of the high- scoring group (15), the medium-scoring group (15) and the low-scoring group (15), based on assessment of the course assignment. Employing the coding step of identifying the Theme and Rheme of each T-unit, the text analysis sought to figure out which Theme types were used for each T-unit and which thematic progression patterns were used for overall text flow and cohesion. The key finding was that there were certain discourse-specific thematic patterns of formal email writing. Among the range of thematic features, this study will highlight marked Themes, interpersonal Themes and thematic choices of nominalization for the purpose of formal email writing texts.

This research aims to explore whether guided visual artwork discussions called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) using picture book images can benefit and enhance Korean EFL secondary students’ L2 writing. Incorporating content analysis, this research examines how carefully guided artwork discussions can enhance visual understanding, critical thinking skills and interpretive L2 writing skills. The L2 writing samples of the focal students revealed that they were able to think based on visual clues. The discussions were led by the teacher who pointed out significant visual elements and allowed time for the students to explore diverse ideas. The focal students were able to piece together the jigsaw of the images and articulate their thoughts in English, during which time they learned to take risks and to make mistakes in using a foreign language. Their critical comments and improved L2 writing suggest how critical/aesthetic thinking skills can be developed through continued visual practices in a secondary EFL setting.