Despite previous research on the use of the first-person pronoun in academic writing, it has rarely been studied in L2 writing and learner corpus research. In this study, the pronoun I was analyzed and compared between native speaking (NS) and Korean nonnative speaking (NNS) corpora of English argumentative writing samples. To identify differences in its discourse functions, three categories (essay commentator, experience provider and opinion provider) were formulated. The findings show that the normalized frequency of the pronoun was higher in the learner corpus. However, the pronoun occurred less frequently within individual essays but was found in more essays. Unlike the NS corpus, the opinion provider occurs more frequently than the experience provider in the learner corpus. For the opinion provider, Korean students usually selected the verb think. The present study suggests the need to develop students’ awareness of the discursive usage of the pronoun and expand their repertoire of metadiscursive devices.

The present study investigates the effect of pronunciation training on Korean adult learners’ perception and production of English vowels, /i/, /I/, /u/, and /Ω/. The study examines 1) the effect of pronunciation training on perception and production and 2) the maintenance of the effect over a one-month period. The subjects were 10 Korean graduate students who took a 4-week long English pronunciation training course. They were tested before and after pronunciation training and tested again one month after the training. In each test, both perception and production of the vowels were tested to see if the subjects were able to distinguish tense and lax vowels. In the perception part, subjects listened for words and checked the vowel (either tense or lax) sound they heard. For the production part, subjects read the selected words which contained the target vowels. The results show that pronunciation training has an effect, which supports the teachability of phonology in adulthood; however, the maintenance of the effect demonstrated a difference between perception and production, in which the effect was maintained in production but not in perception. Based on the results of the study, implications are discussed.