This study aimed to investigate the effects of voice recording as a speaking assignment on Korean EFL nursing students’ speaking confidence and perceptions of speaking assignment. The participants of the study were 22 nursing students who took college English course and were divided into two groups. One was an experimental group performing voice recording assignment for speaking practice during 5 weeks and the other was a control group that did not receive treatment by the researcher. Speaking confidence questionnaire and in-depth interview were used to collect the data in this study. The result of this study showed that there was some statistically significant achievement of the participants’ speaking confidence after speaking assignment of voice recording performed by them. In addition, the participants had positive reaction to the experience of the assignment. This suggests that voice recording assignment encourages students to have their speaking confidence and helps them to overcome speaking difficulties in EFL environment.

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between elementary school students’ self-confidence in English as a foreign language and their assessment of English teaching taught by native speaker English teachers. A total of 126 elementary school students were asked on a 5-point Likert scale instrument to assess their native English teachers in terms of their teaching ability, provision of opportunity to use English, classroom management, and language assessment ability. In addition, the subjects were asked to rate how much they were confident with their English. All of the responses were submitted to the SPSS 22 version for statistical analyses. Firstly, the subjects were divided into 3 groups based on how much they felt confident with their English. Secondly, a MANOVA was run to investigate any group differences in how they perceive their native speaker teachers’ teaching ability, provision of opportunity, and language assessment ability. The results indicated that language confidence was indeed an important variable not only in subjects’ learning English but also how they perceived their English learning experience as a whole. Pedagogical implications for improving elementary school children were also discussed.