This study reports on the findings of a corpus-based analysis of Korean college students' use of English conjunctive adjuncts. Unlike many previous studies that mainly focused on describing the position and semantic types of conjunctions used by learners of English, this study examines grammatical errors of conjunctive adjuncts found in a leaner corpus that consists of 102,632 words written by 399 Korean college freshman students. The main findings of the study can be summarized as follows. First, learners tend to use sentence-initial coordinators even when the sentences before and after the coordinators are not long enough to warrant such usage. Second, sentence fragments occur much more frequently than run-on sentences with the 10 most frequent conjunctive adjuncts found in the corpus. Finally, learners often add unnecessary punctuation marks or omit necessary ones after conjunctive adjuncts, errors which sometimes make it difficult for readers to understand the text. All these errors amount to the conclusion that many Korean learners of English at the university level lack the necessary grammatical knowledge of English conjunctive adjuncts to use them correctlyin academic writing.

This study investigates secondary school English teachers’ perceptions and psychological burdens involved in the implementation of the speaking and writing tests of the National English Ability Test, which is being developed by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. The study surveyed 138 secondary school English teachers in Seoul. Although more than half of the teachers were aware of the new test, 18% of the surveyed teachers were not aware of the fact that speaking and writing skills would be assessed in the new test. Also, 22.7% of the teachers were opposed to the productive skills test. More than half (56.2%) of the teachers felt some psychological burdens toward the inclusion of the speaking/writing tests. Although the teachers admitted that serving as raters for the new test would help improve their teaching, the majority of them were reluctant to participate in the actual rating process. The teachers felt that the difficulty of subjective rating and the lack of time for the speaking and writing tests were serious problems in implementing the new test. The teachers were sensitive toward the students’ test anxiety. They also indicated that they feel a strong psychological burden when making judgments on the students' performances. Implications and suggestions are made based on the findings.

The purpose of this study is to analyze writing activities in Korean high school English textbooks and suggest more effective writing activities in comparison to Chinese textbooks. For the analysis, two Korean and two Chinese high school English textbooks are selected. Writing activities are investigated in terms of three research procedures. The study begins by typifying writing activities as controlled, guided, and free writing, guided by Raimes’ controlled -to-free approach (1983) and Rivers’ five writing instruction stages (1981). Next, it examines writing activities according to the writing criterion prescribed by the Korean and Chinese national curricula, respectively. Finally, it investigates writing activities in relation to other language skills, such as listening, speaking, and reading. The results are as follows. First, while Korean textbooks include more writing activities than Chinese textbooks, there remain substantial imbalances in both. Both textbooks contain the most controlled writing activities and lack free writing. Second, Korean textbooks provide more writing questions than do Chinese textbooks in order to satisfy the national-level writing criteria. However, in comparison to Chinese textbooks, they lack writing activities designed to satisfy paragraph- level writing standards which enhance logical organization competence. Third, Korean textbooks offer more writing activities integrated with other language skills. Both textbooks most frequently contain writing activities integrated with reading skills.

Although fluency is included as one of main aspects to teach and assess in the course of "English Writing" for special-purposed high schools in Korea, any concrete and detailed idea has not been suggested in the guidelines to the course on how this concept could be understood and dealt with both in teaching and testing. This study, therefore, aims at exploring the concept of fluency in writing through both reviewing literature on fluency which is mainly with regard to speaking skills and investigating characteristics in terms of fluency which are observed from 390 writing samples written by 195 Korean students at a foreign language high school. As a result of inductive and qualitative analysis of the data, specific features were observed with regard to quantity, coherence, cohesion and language level. It is suggested that these features could be considered when we trying to understand fluency in depth and establish a rating scheme for it in the context of high school students" writing assessment.

The purpose of this study is to examine the function and spread of English in Korean academic society by investigating the use of English in writing dissertations. To this end, this study selected one of the universities in Korea and attempted to identify to what extent English has been used in master"s and doctoral dissertations for the last 12 years. The results show that the use of English in writing both master"s and doctoral dissertations has increased gradually and there exists a discrepancy among the fields of study. The results also reveal that a number of dissertations in the fields of natural science, engineering and medical science have been written in English recently. The comparison of the results of this study and some related analyses in European universities indicates a similar trend of English use in academic fields. Understanding the current use of English in Koreanacademic society can lead to a better understanding of the role and function of English in Korea as a whole.

This paper demonstrates the findings of an investigation into Korean secondary school English teachers’ practices and perceptions regarding writing instruction. The research employs in-depth interviews with a small number of teachers to identify: (a) teachers’ practices of writing instruction and assessment in the classroom; (b) teachers’ perceptions of writing instruction; (c) teachers’ evaluation of students’ writing abilities; and (d) teachers’ concerns or problems in teaching of writing. The results indicate that there exist discrepancies among teachers’ practices, perceptions, the National Curriculum and the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT): the curriculum provides writing goals that are too high for students; teachers cannot help focusing on low-level features of writing mainly due to students’ poor writing ability; and teachers and students do not have an urgent necessity to teach and learn writing, since writing is not tested in the CSAT. The paper concludes by providing implications and suggestions for future development of writing instruction in the Korean secondary school English classroom.

This paper presents the rationale behind a newly-developed and implemented college freshman program designed to improve writing skills and the outcomes after one year running. In line with the current teaching trend of colleges in Korea, this program has several features such as placing the freshmen into different levels based on their writing skills, running class focusing on writing skills and giving a S/U grade. Comparisons between a pre-writing test and two post-writing tests show that this program has contributed to increasing the students’ writing skills. The students’ responses to the questionnaire of the program also endorse the test results. A couple of pedagogical implications concerning EFL writing education are suggested.

Frequent interactions between teachers and learners take place in cyber education. It was found that tutors in cyber education play important roles in interactions. This is to acknowledge the characteristics of cyber education by watching and analyzing the interactions between learners and tutors that performed in the course of “cyber English writing class” of a cyber university. The main tools of interactions, e-bulletin board and e-writing assignment board have been quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. In order to learn whether the degree of the learners’ participation influences the degree of the learners’ achievement, a correlation analysis between the two variables was conducted. A questionnaire was also conducted to learn how the learners respond to tutors’ feedback in their interactions. This study also investigated any differences of the attitude and satisfaction degree in a cyber writing class according to the learners’ participation degree. It was found that the degree of the learners’ achievement and the learners’ participation are most correlated especially when the learners are in the medium level of the academic ability. Also, the learners generally think the tutors’ feedback gives to them positive influences.