This study examined effects of pronunciation training using automatic speech recognition technology on common pronunciation errors of Korean English learners. Participants were divided into two groups. One group was given instruction and training about the use of automatic speech recognition for pronunciation practice. The other group was not given such instruction or training as a control group. A pre- and post-test experimental design was used. The treatment period was four weeks. Participants who were taught about using automatic speech recognition for pronunciation practice showed small but significant improvements in pronunciation accuracy than those who did not. In addition, automatic speech recognition was found to assist in the diagnostic evaluation of common pronunciation errors, although it did not produce statistically significant improvements. Participants responded positively to the use of automatic speech recognition for pronunciation practice and testing, although there remain some concerns over technical aspects of the test.

This study investigated the effects of complex problem-solving activities involving children’s literature on students’ critical thinking dispositions and English production. Thirty-one sixth-grade students were given lessons over a seven-week period. Various types of data were analyzed qualitatively, and the results of a critical thinking disposition test were analyzed quantitatively. Results were as follows: First, the critical thinking dispositions test revealed positive changes in open-mindedness, independence, objectivity, and inquisitiveness. The highest score was found for open-mindedness. The largest increase in score was for independence and objectivity. Second, changes in critical thinking dispositions enriched children’s English production. Open-mindedness helped with spoken language production as it encouraged students to share their opinions freely. Independence was mainly expressed in writing form in which students could question and evaluate the text. Greater objectivity was applied to spoken and written language production as the subjects were able to recognize the importance of evidence. Inquisitiveness affected children’s writing as it drove them to write down the results of their own research.

This study addresses the lack of comprehension data in second language acquisition research by focusing on English existential there-constructions (ETCs) with a locative extension (e.g., there is an X on the Y). The post-copular noun X used in the present study consisted of two types: actual and nonsense. Participants included 40 native speakers, as well as 40 advanced and 40 intermediate Korean learners of English, who completed an online picture selection task. In one picture, X was placed on the nearby Y; in another picture, X was placed on the far Y. The choice of both pictures was the correct response because ETCs are used to describe the existence of something regardless of its distance. There was a statistically significant relationship between English proficiency and the interpretation of ETCs. However, there was no relationship between the noun type and the interpretation of ETCs. In the Korean English curriculum, the distinction between expletive there and locative there must be emphasized.

The purpose of the study is two-fold: (a) to investigate L2 learners’ receptive and productive collocational knowledge concerning the learners’ lexical proficiency levels, and (b) to explore the degree of their productive collocational knowledge. A total of 358 Korean university students participated in this study and completed a Vocabulary Size Test, two receptive collocation tests, and one productive collocation test. The results revealed that there was significance among the scores of three collocation tests. It is also observed that receptive and productive collocational competence tends to increase as L2 learners’ vocabulary size develops. Regarding productive collocational knowledge gains, significant differences were found among collocation combinations but no interaction effect was found between combination types and vocabulary levels. The findings indicated that L2 learners need to be aware of the importance of learning collocational knowledge while teachers need to attempt to help them notice high-frequency collocations that regularly occur in various contexts.

Although the use of Grammatical Metaphor (GM) has been regarded as one of the representative features of academic writing in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), not many studies have explored its role in second or foreign language writers’ writing quality. This study aimed to discover the potential relationship between GM development and argumentative writing quality of advanced Korean EFL learners, while controlling for their overall language proficiency and reading comprehension ability. The findings from this study unveiled significant contribution of the use of both premature and mature GM and also identified transcategorization as the specific GM that has relatively stronger predictability of writing quality. The results from current research yield meaningful pedagogical implications for writing instruction in Korean EFL contexts.

This study explores how Korean English learners process English caused-motion constructions (CMC) through online and offline experiments. The focus was on how Korean learners’ processing of English CMC is affected by the typological difference between English and Korean. Of the 77 volunteer participants recruited, 17 were native English speakers and 60 were Korean EFL learners. The experiments included a sentence completion task (SCT) as an online experiment, and an acceptability jugment task (AJT) and a translation (correction) task as offline experiments. The results showed that in the SCT, the Korean learners showed difficulty in combining process and result events with intransitive manner verbs. In the AJT, they rarely accepted the CMCs with intransitive manner verbs, but easily accepted the ‘causative verb + byphrase’ structures with the same type of verbs. When the sentences were employed in the AJT were asked to be translated into Korean, the low-intermediate Korean learners were likely to drop the result meaning and interpret the preposition phrase as a locative rather than a goal. In sum, Korean learners showed similar patterns to native English speakers in processing path verbs and transitive manner verbs, but different pattern in processing intransitive manner verbs. These findings demonstrate that Korean learners' processing of English CMC is heavily influenced by their L1 when the construction accompanied intransitive manner verbs.

This study investigates individual verb differences in Korean learners‟ use of English non-alternating unaccusatives as well as the factors that influence various errors. Specifically, it focuses on the effects of L1 transfer and animacy of subjects on overpassivization errors. Concordance lines from a learner corpus consisting of 6,572 essays written by Korean college-level learners were analyzed to observe the syntactic distribution across ten non-alternating unaccusative verbs. The results revealed that overpassivization errors show disproportionate dispersion across the ten unaccusative verbs, and that Korean L1 influence is not a significant factor while inanimate subjects influence overpassivization. Furthermore, salient error patterns such as transitivization and overgenerated be were identified from the Korean learners‟ use of unaccusative verbs. This study proposes that some unaccusative verbs are more susceptible to overpassivization errors, and that Korean learners of English will benefit from being able to identify the factors contributing to errors for each unaccusative verb.

This paper examines the use of the present perfect by Korean learners of English. Forty-four first grade high school students and eleven college students participated and wrote an essay on a given topic. The writing samples were analyzed in terms of the appropriate, inappropriate uses of the present perfect and the relations between the inherent lexical aspects and the form use. The results showed that the learners used the present perfect in a good sense with appropriate perfect types. Most of them were accompanied with temporal adverbials such as since or so far. In addition, they also showed many misuses with past, present, and pluperfect for the present perfect, revealing that they tended to encode only one temporal part of the present perfect. Regarding the use of the aspectual verb, activities and states occurred more in the use of the present perfect in the students’ writings. Based on these results, pedagogical implications were suggested.

Developing small learner and native corpora, this case study examines how Korean L2 learners used six types of lexical collocations in L2 writing to address (a) the frequency and acceptability of learner collocations, (b) problematic constituents of deviant collocations, and (c) possible sources of the learner difficulties. The overall frequency (about 8% of each corpus) and relative frequencies of each collocation type were similar between the learner and native corpora in descending order of adjective-noun, verb-noun, noun-noun, adverb-verb, adverb-adjective, and noun-verb combinations. The average and individual acceptability rates of each collocation type were around 70% and the problematic constituents were found both in nodes and collocates. L2 influence on learner difficulties mostly lied in confusions about synonyms, overuse of delexical verbs, and use of correct collocations in wrong contexts. Relying on L1 semantic representations, the learners produced non-habitual combinations, misrepresented the intended meaning, and paraphrased L2 collocations. Pedagogical implications arose for teaching L2 collocations about the importance of considering the immediate context of L2 writing and taking different approaches to different types of collocations.

This study investigated whether task complexity may affect L2 speaking performance as predicted by the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2011), and whether the effect of task complexity may interact with individual differences in working memory capacity. A total of twenty Korean advanced-level EFL learners performed two separate picture description tasks, which were different in task complexity along [+/- here and now] dimension. Their working memory was measured by an L1 version of a reading span task. The results showed that there was no significant difference between Here-and-Now task (i.e., a simple task) and There-and-Then task (i.e., a complex task) in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency of English speaking performance, rejecting the prediction of the Cognition Hypothesis. Yet, it found that working memory correlated with accuracy in L2 performance on the complex task, but not on the simple task. This indicates that the effect of individual learners’ working memory capacity is observable only when a task demands a high control of attentional resources. Conversely, when a task is simple, individual differences in working memory capacity do not result in significant differences in L2 speaking performance.

This paper adopts a multi-factorial analysis and investigates English dative alternations in Korean EFL learners’ writings, by directly comparing dative alternations of native speakers and those of Korean EFL learners’ writings. Two corpora were chosen for the comparison: the Switchboard corpus (written sections) and the Korean component of the TOEFL11 corpus. After all the sentences with dative alternations were extracted from these two corpora, and seventeen linguistic factors were manually encoded, the data were statistically analyzed in R. This paper was theoretically based on the concept of interlanguage in the Second Language Acquisition and Competition Model of Bates and MacWhinney (1982, 1989). Through the analysis, the following facts were observed: (i) the Korean EFL learners used ditransitive constructions more frequently than prepositional constructions, (ii) eight main factors and four interactions with the L1 were statistically significant, and (iii) the ditransitive constructions which the Korean EFL learners used were closer to the prepositional constructions rather than the ditransitive constructions in Korean.

This study investigated L2 production, perception, and the relation of production and perception by examining 20 Korean learners’ production and perception of the English contrasts of /ʃ/ vs. /ʃi/, /ʧ/ vs. /ʧi/, and /ʤ/ vs. /ʤi/ in word final position. Of the 20 Korean learners, 10 (5 males, 5 females) were low in English proficiency and the other 10 (5 males, 5 females) were high. Our findings from production and perception experiments showed that the relation of L2 production and perception varies according to learners’ proficiency levels in L2. A significant correlation between L2 production and perception was attested within the high group learners. Thus, the high group learners with higher production accuracy generally exhibited higher perception accuracy. Unlike the high group, the low group learners’ production and perception patterns did not show any significant correlation between the two. In general, the low group displayed higher accuracy in production than in perception. In addition, within the low group, the heavy influence of L1 constraints on L2 perception was attested while L2 production was not in accordance with L1 phonology.

The English dative alternation, which involves an alternation between the double object construction (DC) and the adpositional construction (AC), has been known to be one of the most problematic areas for L2 learners. This paper investigates the factors influencing the Korean English as a foreign language learners’ choices between the two constructions. The Korean section of the TOEFL11 corpus was used and sentences with dative constructions were extracted from the corpus. Nine factors were then encoded and analyzed with a generalized linear mixed-effect model. From the analysis, the following facts were observed: (1) Korean EFL learners’ choice between the DC and the AC was influenced by five factors: animacy of theme, definiteness of theme, pronominality of recipient, length difference between theme and recipient, and individual verbs; (2) despite some similarities in choice of alternation between Korean EFL learners and ENL speakers, the two groups also exhibited differences, and (3) these differences originated from the different effects of these factors.

The present study explores the effects of peer intimacy on Korean primary English learners' collaborative group work in terms of writing achievement and peer interaction. Fifty six elementary school students engaged in small group work on English writing tasks. They were grouped in three different types: high intimacy level group, low intimacy level group, and random group. The study results indicated no significant group differences in the students' abilities and attitudes of English writing. However, the three groups differed in the quantity and quality of peer interaction. The high intimacy group produced the largest number of utterance and the most collaborative interactions. The low intimacy group, on the other hand, produced more utterances but less collaborative interactions than did the random group. Overall, the study results suggested that peer intimacy may have no immediate effect on students' learning through small group work but it possibly has delayed effects in prolonged group work by mediating the quantity and quality of peer interactions. Limitations of the study and pedagogical suggestions are provided.

The purpose of this study is to examine effective ways to introduce creative thinking skills development in the English learning classroom, specifically, focusing on questioning techniques and creative thinking techniques. The study explores selected creative-thinking techniques which are in accordance with English teaching methods and goals in the Korean context. The techniques highlighted were deemed adequate for enhancing creative and analytical thinking skills of English language learners and include the following: Brainwriting, SCAMPER, Lotus Blossom Technique, Forced Relationships/Analogy, Wishful Thinking Technique, Six Thinking Hats, SWOT, PMI technique, Flat Stanley Project. The study attempts to outline examples of and procedures for implementing such techniques in English education. The study is intended to provide insights for both researchers and practitioners alike and shall thus contribute to the ongoing discussion of integrating creativity education with English learning and teaching.

The present study addresses a learnability problem in the acquisition of English progressive aspect by Korean learners of English. As Korean and English differ in the way that the lexical aspect of verbs interacts with progressive morphology, we predicted that Korean learners of English would be affected by their L1 aspectual system, accepting non-targetlike combinations of lexical aspect and aspectual morphology. Sixty Korean university students were presented with sentences containing different aspectual classes of verbs in two conditions—the progressive and the simple present—and were asked to judge the naturalness of the sentences. The results showed that the majority of the learners erroneously accepted progressive sentences containing stative verbs. It also showed that the learners accepted simple present constructions containing eventitive verbs for an ongoing interpretation,indicating the pervasiveness of L1 transfer. The findings strongly suggest that Korean EFL learners have difficulty ruling out erroneous form-meaning associations based on their L1 progressive morphology.

This study draws on recent corpus-based information to investigate the influence of frequency on Korean ESL learners’ acquisition of English verbs occurring with the double object construction (DC). Thirty low English proficiency Koreans (LPK), 30high English proficiency Koreans (HPK), and 30 native English speakers (NS)participated in an acceptability judgment test and an elicited production task featuring six high frequency (HF) verbs and six low frequency (LF) verbs. Results indicate that (a) both the LPK and the HPK more favorably accepted and more frequently produced DC sentences with HF verbs than with LF verbs and (b) the HPK more favorably accepted and more frequently produced DC sentences with both HF and LF verbs than the LPK. These results are interpreted as evidence for the significant role of frequency in Korean learners’ acquisition of English verbs occurring with the DC. The study ends with a discussion of theoretical and pedagogical implications.

The current study focused on acquisition of If-conditionals by L2 learners of English with two different native tongues, Spanish and Korean, and with two different proficiency levels, high and low. An experiment with two subparts, each focusing on production and comprehension respectively, was performed in order to explore which factor among input frequencies, grammatical complexities and L1 influence best explains the acquisition of If-conditionals by L2 learners. The results from both production and comprehension data suggest that If-conditionals with lower hypotheticality are acquired before than those with higher hypotheticality by L2learners, just as they are by children learning their L1, and hierarchies of input frequencies best explain the acquisition order of If-conditionals. At this point, it is not possible to distinguish between influences of input frequencies and typological universals, as they coincide. One thing for sure is that both L1 and L2 acquisitions seem to be influenced by them, suggesting the universality of language acquisition. Influence of instruction, on the other hand, was also found, especially in the production data of the higher-level L2 learners. Even though there were no differences in the acquisition order of If-conditionals between the two groups of learners with different L1 backgrounds, the influence of L1 was also found in the analysis of non-target forms produced by learner participants.

There has been considerable research which investigates whether the underlying linguistic competence of L2 learners is constrained by principles and parameters of UG, parallel to the situation in L1 acquisition. In terms of the Scope Principle (henceforth SP), a principle of UG, which is associated with the scope interaction between a quantified expression and a wh-phrase, some experimental studies in EFL settings were conducted to investigate whether or not interlanguage grammars can be characterized by the principle. These experiments were carried out through the Truth Value Judgment Task (henceforth TVJT) alone, showing contrasting and confusing results, especially between Japanese learners and Korean learners. That is, while Japanese EFL learners observed the SP, Korean EFL learners did not despite the fact that both Japanese L1 grammar and Korean L1 grammar disallow the distributive interpretation, especially in the ambiguous sentence like what does everyone have? Therefore, the present study aims to confirm whether the same results are obtained provided that the identical experiment using the TVJT is repeated in other EFL learners. Noticeably, this study employed an additional, complementary task (Question and Answer Task, QAT) in addition to the TVJT as an attempt to increase the accuracy of the task and reflect learners’ actual knowledge of the target features. In QAT, the subjects were asked to write the answers to the target questions involving quantifiers and wh-questions in English. Results from the TVJT appeared, on the face of it, to provide support for the claim that the Korean EFL learners are under control of the Scope Principle. However, findings from QAT revealed that they are not constrained by the principle. Thus, it would be reasonable to conclude that the results of the present experiment do not fully support the claim that the Korean EFL learners’ interlanguage grammar has access to the UG-driven Scope Principle. Instead, it can be argued that Korean learners' interlanguage grammar may be affected by their L1 grammar, which gives rise to the claim that the explicit instruction on the interpretation of those sentences is required as part of overcoming this problem.