With AI and other digital technologies emerging as the norm in our daily lives, it’s time for teachers to prepare for a transition to a technology-based class. This study is aimed at understanding learners’ perceptions of an EduTech-utilized practicum at a university English pedagogy course. For this purpose, three questions were presented in terms of students’ overall satisfaction, user experience, and difference in perceptions of technology-based class by prior exposure to digital technology. Twenty-one students participated in 6 periods of digital technology-based practicum spanning for 8 weeks in the spring of 2024. The study collected student questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and classroom observations for data analysis. Frequency analysis and independent samples t-tests were conducted for quantitative data, and theme analysis for qualitative data. Three major findings are as follows: Firstly, the analysis of the quantitative data revealed a high level of students’ overall satisfaction and user experience of EduTech-utilized practicum. Secondly, qualitative data supported the usefulness of digital technology-based class in general and pedagogical benefits in particular. Lastly, students’ prior exposure to digital technologybased class did not make a significant impact on their perceptions of EduTech-utilized practicum.

This study investigated how pre-service English teachers develop and use MICT (mobile information and communication technology)-TPACK (technological pedagogy and content knowledge) to select and use mobile applications for their micro teaching in a pre-service teacher training program. Although mobile technology has rapidly developed with the adoption of mobile multimedia devices and applications, the use of pre-service teachers’ TPACK is still limited to lower-level searches and to a mere tool for content presentations. The participants were nine students in a pre-service teacher training course in a four-year women’s university. Several research methods such as surveys, participant observations, micro teaching and interviews were utilized. The results of the study show the concept of TPACK needs to be extended to MICT-TPACK in this mobile age. The use of pre-service English teachers’ MICT-TPACK impacted and changed their concept of pedagogy to heutagogy. The teachers used mobile applications to facilitate their students’ inquiry-based learning of English as a subject as well as a medium of digital literacy. In order to select mobile applications for their lesson, the teachers developed a modified version of quality criteria for mobile applications. This study suggests there should be well-developed quality criteria for evaluating affordances of mobile applications.

The paper presents selected aspects of critical language pedagogy that are relevant to recent developments in Korean English Education. The paper articulates the personal viewpoint of a scholar outside Korea. Particular emphasis is placed on historical background, the nature of critique, and the role of the intellectual in society. The English Divide in Korea is presented as an issue that calls for a critical perspective on English education. This is briefly analyzed from an economics of education point of view, itself an example of critical pedagogy that does not only focus on classrooms and curriculum theory. Key aspects of critical language pedagogy are sketched, with reference to precursors from Korean history and cultural forms. These precursors are also brought to bear on the role that intellectuals could play in advancing a critical perspective on English education, in Korean society, which is suggested to be a moral imperative, distinct from instrumental understandings of education.

This short essay is a slightly modified version of a presentation read at the annual Institute seminar held at SNU on the 5th of December to exchange views on the function of reading in foreign language education in Korea. It begins with the discussion of a need on the paπ of policy makers of English teaching to reassess and revise the dominantly pragmatic and instrumentalist philosophy particularly working in the pedagogy of reading in English. According to the revisionist review of the present writer, the guiding spirit of the 4-skill orientation has so far tended to overvalue the linguistic and communicative functions (or ’grammar’ as is termed here to contrast with the 'text’ that follows) at the cost of the human or readerly values carried by signifying textuality of the reading material. Language should and is fated to reflect and realize the lived experience of concrete and individualized people and society. English is a natural and cultural language that embraces a11 these cultural resourcefulness and expressiveness before it is a foreign language. Strategies of reading pedagogy ought to reflect this fundamental as well as human or value-oriented aspect of language despite the limited level of the language on the part of its leamers.