In the era of the 4th industrial revolution, creativity plays a pivotal role in the competitiveness of a country. The importance of creativity education therefore cannot be overemphasized. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of discussion-based English reading and writing activities on Korean high school students' creativity, English writing, and self-assessed creative thinking. The participants were 45 high school students in Seoul, Korea. They were divided into two groups: the discussion-based English reading and writing group (n=24) and the traditional English instruction group (n=21). The experiment was administered during two semesters of the 2017 academic year. The major findings are as follows: First, the experimental group showed significant improvement on the creativity test, especially in the areas of fluency, flexibility, and original thinking. Second, the experimental group outperformed the control group on the writing test. Third, the experimental group showed positive changes in their self-assessed flexible thinking, convergent thinking, and intrinsic motivation. All of these indicate the beneficial effects of the discussion-based English reading and writing activities. Based on the results, some pedagogical suggestions were made for the effective integration of creativity education into the teaching of English as a foreign language.

The study aims to examine whether teaching English through multiple intelligences can suggest one of the solutions for underachievers to facilitate their English learning and restore their learning attitudes. To explore this, the study investigated two research questions: (a) What are the effects of English instruction using multiple intelligences and stories on underachievers’ reading abilities? and (b) How English instruction using multiple intelligences and stories influences on their learning attitudes? The participants of the study were seven fifth-grade underachievers in one elementary school in Seoul. They were first tested what their strong intelligences are and engaged in customized activities based on their multiple intelligences test results during the experiment English classes. The data collected include the read-aloud test, the reading comprehension test, the affective test, students’ learning log and the interview of students and teachers, and these were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results of the study showed that English instruction using multiple intelligences and stories had statistical significance in increasing underachievers’ reading abilities and changing their learning attitudes positively. This study is valuable in that it strongly calls for the need to consider multiple intelligences and provide customized activities for underachievers to facilitate their English learning and restore their learning attitudes.

This study investigated the effects of different gloss locations in extensive reading readers on English reading abilities of elementary students. It examined four groups of sixth graders in an elementary school and an extensive reading class was conducted over sixteen weeks. The four groups were given graded readers with four different types of glosses, such as non-gloss, marginal gloss, footnote gloss, and endnote gloss. To verify the effects of this experiment, pre- and post-reading ability test for the cognitive domain and pre- and post-questionnaire for the affective domain were administered to see if there were any achievement in reading ability and affective domain. The findings were as follows: (1) The four groups showed improvement in the reading ability tests. This result indicates that extensive reading was effective in improving students' reading ability; (2) The footnote gloss group showed the greatest change. This result indicates that footnote glosses influenced the most in improving students' reading ability; (3) All the groups showed positive results in the affective domain including attitude, self-confidence, interest, expectation, and value. In conclusion, extensive reading made a positive effect on all four groups and footnote glosses proved to be the most effective in both cognitive and affective domain.

This study investigated whether the simple view of reading framework is supported among Upper elementary Korean EFL learners. Specifically, the relative contributive power of two emergent literacy factors, word decoding and linguistic comprehension abilities, which have been identified as the main determinants of successful reading comprehension, was examined. Ninety nine fifth grade students in Korean elementary school participated in this research, and their decoding skills, listening comprehension abilities, and reading comprehension in English were measured. The findings revealed that both English decoding skills and linguistic comprehension ability were significant predictors of their English reading comprehension, which supports the simple view of reading within the Korean EFL context. Specifically, decoding skill explained more of the variance, compared to linguistic comprehension, in reading comprehension when controlling for each other. The result is discussed in terms of the overall development of L2 proficiency and the role of L2 exposure in L2 reading comprehension development.