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.

This case study aimed to examine ways Korean university students in an English critical reading class participated in educational action projects. For this purpose, the reading class was designed to enhance students’ critical thinking skills and global citizenship as readers. Eighteen students in the class were taught by the teacher how to read texts in English using a critical perspective. The reading class was managed in a flexible mode with comprehension check-ups, critical dialoguing, and student-initiated action. Students were invited to connect what they discussed to action outcomes as a group project. Students in groups presented their understanding of readings and what they discussed in critical dialogues of the readings. They then reported what they did outside the classroom to foster themselves as truly active citizens in their local circumstances. Their group reports and project products were collected and analyzed into themes using qualitative methods. It was revealed that critical dialogue activities could help students come up with action-provoking questions on the readings, bring about a variety of action outcomes resulting from collaborations in groups, and help students become more active readers and citizens. Educational implications are also discussed.

This study explores whether there are any differences between monolingual Korean and bilingual Korean-Chinese university students in terms of their beliefs about language learning. The Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI, Horwitz, 1987) was distributed to university students in Korea and China to identify learners’ beliefs about language learning. Monolingual Korean and bilingual Korean-Chinese students reported similar opinions about foreign language aptitude and difficulty of language learning. The study also found that Korean-Chinese students were more confident than Korean students about their special ability for learning a new language. In addition, more Korean students than Korean-Chinese students reported that they felt timid in speaking English with native speakers or with other people. Because this study is the first research attempt to compare the differences in beliefs about language learning between monolingual and bilingual EFL learners, the results of this study should provide significant information about and implications for teaching and learning a foreign language by comparing the behaviors and thoughts of Korean and Korean-Chinese university students.

L1 and L2 summaries written by Korean university students in an EFL writing class were studied to determine the causes of instances of “plagiarism.” Summaries in both L1 and L2 were evaluated holistically along with seven essays in L2. It was found that more proficient writers in L1 and L2 tend to demonstrate less Reliance on the Source Text1); and a good amount of Reliance was also present in L1 as well as L2, suggesting that L2 interference is not the only cause of Reliance. These findings indicate a relation between Reliance on the Source text and writing ability both in L1 and L2. Moreover, a closer look at instances of Reliance often revealed efforts by the writers to integrate source text material into their own texts, though these attempts often seemed like “plagiarism” to writing teachers. However, Reliance in these cases may not be plagiarism per se from students’ point of view. The results are expected to help teachers understand the causes and nature of students’Reliance on the Source text in the writing instruction.

Working memory is defined as the mechanisms or processes that allow humans to store information in the face of interference such as processing other information during sentence processing. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between working memory capacity and PBL task performance with EFL university students. Forty university students participated in this study and they were divided into two groups according to working memory scores (higher and lower groups). Reading span test has been implemented for working memory task. PBL tasks consist of word, phrase, sentence, and explanation levels. The results show that WM capacity is significantly related to the PBL task performance. The correlation analysis of WM scores(storage and processing) and PBL task performance showed different tendency in WM higher and lower groups according to the task types.

The present study aimed at investigating the effects of collaborative work between Korean EFL university students and international foreign students on Intercultural Communicative Competence. Twenty four students (14 Korean students and 10 international students) participated in this research. Chen and Starosta’s (2000) intercultural sensitivity scale was implemented with Paradigm Software to measure the participants’ resolution latency time while they were responding to the survey. The results demonstrated that two groups showed significant differences in the areas of respect for cultural difference and interaction confidence. Also, apart from the response value, the analysis of resolution latency time showed other aspects of participants’ cognitive level of intercultural sensitivity. Thus, this study indicates that a multi-round analysis can give a more in-depth insight beyond the mean value of the survey’s response.

Boon-Joo Park. 2017. Analysis of Oral Reading Miscue in EFL University Students’ L1 and L2 reading. Studies in Modern Grammar 96, 213-233. Readers tend to make errors or mistakes regarding grammar, meaning, or pronunciation through the interaction between readers and text during the reading process. However, those errors or mistakes need to be considered as positive aspects as, miscues, Ken Goodman (1977) coined instead of mistakes. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of miscue analysis for developing students’ reading strategy during the reading process both in Korean and in English. Sixteen university students who are learning English as a second language participated. The results showed a very significant difference of the miscue aspects between L1 reading and L2 reading. The participants tend to focus more on semantic cues during L1 reading than the process during the L2 reading whereas they tend to use more graphic and syntactic cues.