The present study examines the usage patterns of stance that constructions in Korean EFL learners' written corpora by two different proficiency groups (KEFL 1, KEFL 2) to figure out some developmental features of marking stance in L2 academic prose. Focusing on three main categories (stance verbs, adjectives, and nouns) controlling stance that clauses, the study compares the frequency of each feature by the categories and their subcategories across the corpora. Employing both quantitative and qualitative analyses, the study found a marked developmental path across the corpora as a cross-sectional study. Indeed, less proficient L2 learners tended to use spoken involvement features as ‘a subjective transmitter’, emphasizing the writer's view only with a private authorial voice. However, more advanced learners showed remarkable features as ‘an objective interpreter’ with more implicitly detached stances. Despite a few chunk expressions considered as being memorized, more complex grammatical resources appropriate for academic discourse were observed. Finally, as the final stage, this study suggests ‘a refined stance-taker’ referring to an expert writer in the academic discourse community, which may be devoid in untrained native speakers' writing. In accordance with the need for university students to transition into more advanced academic discourse sooner, this study provides some practical insights into teaching and learning of stance patterns in using that complement clauses in English academic discourse.

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(3). 1~30. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the awareness and attitudes of Korean learners about Academic Writing and to identify the problems which should be solved in academic writing education for Korean learners. For this, 62 foreign students were conducted a questionnaire survey, and 18 of them were interviewed to elicit their attitudes, perceptions about academic writing. A result of analysis showed that students have a very negative attitude towards writing. Moreover, they are not aware of the importance of writing. Therefore, they are negligent of writing and do not actively participate in academic activities. Second, students know the connection between general purpose writing learning and academic writing learning, but they have no systematic understanding of Korean academic writing. They simply gain knowledge of writing by imitating. Third, although they showed a willingness to be good at academic writing, they lacked subjective initiative on writing learning. And their writing study was centered on TOPIK. In order to solve these problems, this paper suggested solutions from an ecological perspective: language knowledge entry, learning environment, and learner’s self - growth. First, it is needed to help foreign students to have a systematic knowledge of academic writing as soon as possible. Second, outside the classroom, students should be offered a variety of opportunities to participate in academic activities. third, it is necessary to study the internal motivation of interest which attracts students’ attention and allow them to have a positive attitude about academic writing.

The present study investigates the use of signaling nouns (SNs) in published and Korean graduate student academic writing in applied linguistics. A set of 35 nouns was examined for their frequency as SNs, while the six most frequent SNs in published writing were subjected to detailed analyses of realization patterns. The results indicated that the nouns function as SNs in fifteen percent of the time of their total use and that students overall used a greater number of SNs than did published authors. Despite considerable overlap in the most frequent SNs, there was evidence that students rely on a narrower range of SNs than published writers. Published authors were differentiated from students in employing more anaphoric SNs, which contributed to cohesiveness and organization of text through the effective encapsulation of the preceding stretch of discourse. This study challenges the previous claim that the frequency of SNs positively correlates with the writing proficiency. Some pedagogical implications are drawn for academic writing instruction.

A large number of foreign students enroll at Korean universities each year. Although a good command of the Korean language is crucial for them to be successful in their studies, and both university authorities and teaching staff now agree that students’ language ability needs to be tested before their admission, a valid and reliable test of academic Korean is still to be developed. The aim of this paper was twofold: to determine the Korean language proficiency level and language task types that are necessary to succeed at the university level in Korea; and to determine test specifications that could be used by examiners to appraise university candidates’ language skills. To develop such specifications, Common European Framework (CEF) descriptors of language proficiency were used. These descriptors can be used as indicators showing which language tasks a candidate should be able to do at a certain level. To create test specifications, academically relevant descriptors were selected and task types associated with each were analyzed. Many descriptors associated with the B2 level of the CEF were used to determine the language achievement level necessary for university students in Korea. Information about linguistic input and output associated with each language task type was also gained and applied from CEF descriptors.

This paper aims to explore the problematic nature of the use of adverbial connectors employed in NNS and NS academic essays by using two different corpora from Korean university students and from English native speakers in the UK. Combining corpus-based and discourse analytic approaches, the study focuses on the frequency and distributions of adverbial connectors, thus investigating in what ways this can affect the rhetorical features in terms of the text cohesion and structure. The results indicate that the Korean sample students shared the problem of other L2 writers with the overuse of overall connectors, but they showed a strong preference for using colloquial and spoken forms of adverbial connectors. On semantic relations, the overuse problem occurred in the listing, in particular, reinforcing types of the adverbial connectors. The noteworthy difference is that the mechanical repetitions of listing and contrasting ideas, and connecting them in a cause-effect sequence was identified more frequently in the Korean student texts than in the native student ones. However, counter-argument is more preferred in the argumentative context of the native student texts with more overt use of contrastive connecting items. Finally, most of the misused connectors were identified to simply repeat the ideas in the same viewpoint, which may have led to a failure in developing logical sequences in argumentative discourse. Another misuse type of connectors may derive from sociopragmatic transfer from L1 to L2. The findings thus may give some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise culture-specific register awareness and understand the different semantic types of adverbial connectors.