they joined an English camp in Ireland with European students for one month. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were applied to examine learners' English proficiency and English anxiety. TOEIC Bridge was a tool for investigating students' English proficiency. In addition, adapted version of Gardner's 7 scale AMTB (Attitude/Motivation Test Battery) demonstrated the change of learners' language class anxiety and language use anxiety. The data were analyzed by Repeated Measure. Furthermore, field notes and an interview corroborated the quantified results of proficiency and anxiety. It is shown that most participants' English proficiency in listening and reading comprehension has dramatically improved after staying in Ireland while their English classroom anxiety and English use anxiety highly diminished. Lastly, this study searched the key elements of the English camp which made the camp successful to apply to the Korean domestic English curriculum.

The purpose of this experimental study is threefold: first, to explore the relationship between metaphoric competence (MC) and language proficiency (LP) of nonnative speakers; second, to examine any significance in correlations in connection with what metaphor is and how it is comprehended and third, to put forward a few pedagogical considerations for development of MC in a L2 context. Ninety-five individuals subdivided into three groups of native and nonnative speakers form the subject of this study. Four test measures are constructed to assess the subjects" MC and LP. The findings of this correlational study are as follows: There is no correlation between MC and LP in the representative group of nonnative speakers (NNS). However, one group of NNS living and studying in the target culture displays a convincingly strong correlation, indicating that MC must be acquired through experiencing the culture firsthand. Neverthless, the other NNS group demonstrates an unexpectedly strong positive correlation in one test of metaphoric competence, implying that the linguistic cues of the verb- phrase (VP)-focused metaphors must have helped with their interpretation of the concept structures. This study provides empirical evidence that MC in L2 should be deliberately taught in class from the cognitive hypothesis especially where L2 is spoken.

The majority of studies on L2 writing strategies to date has relied heavily on case study as a research methodology employing think-aloud protocols and texts written by the participants. Since the studies dealt with a small number of participants, the findings are inconclusive and sometimes contradictory, and little research on the writing strategies has been conducted in EFL contexts. The present study investigated EFL learners" writing strategies and compared the more-proficient writers" strategies to those of the less-proficient peers. It furthermore examined an assumption of a connection between writing strategy use and writing proficiency. The study was conducted with two writing classes that consisted of 26 more-proficient and 23 less-proficient writers. Two different proficiency groups were divided in proportion to students" scores on the diagnostic composition test. Strategies were measured by means of the modified questionnaire originally developed by Petri？ and Cz？rl (2003). The strategy items were stated in three different phases of the writing process (planning, while-writing, and revising). The results indicated that (1) the more-proficient writers used significantly more planning and while-writing strategies and (2) planning and revising strategies correlated significantly with students" composition scores.

This article focuses on analysis of 11 storytelling samples produced by Korean adult test-takers of an English speaking proficiency test. The process of telling stories, hearing the stories, and retelling them is a commonly used way of communication with others not only in a classroom but also in everyday life, and moreover storytelling is a task often used in English speaking proficiency tests. Although it is surely an important part of our lives as mentioned above, there has not been much research on structure and characteristics of storytelling and its value in English language education. It should be discussed in public that what storytelling can do for English education in Korea, more specifically in teaching English speaking. This study provides what cyclical structure of storytelling is and what it means to English language education in Korea. It is illustrated that storytelling task samples of advanced learners of English can be well understood from the framework of storytelling components (Bidell, Hubbard, & Weaver, 1997).

The purposes of this paper are to report the English proficiency of Korean university students through TOEIC test, and to suggest feasible ways to improve their communicative competence. A total of one thousand and forty-two sophomore students who took the Practical English course participated in this study. The data based on TOEIC scores were analyzed and the major findings revealed that: (1) Although students had slightly higher scores on the written language sections than on the spoken language parts, they had the lowest scores in the grammar section; (2) The total listening comprehension scores were significantly correlated with the total reading scores; (3) There was a high positive correlation between students’ proficiency level and their scores; (4) Multiple regression analysis showed that part 3 (short conversations) influenced significantly on the total listening part, while part 6 (grammar) had a significant effect on the total reading part. In conclusion, these findings contribute to the emerging picture of what constitutes a successful language learner by proposing a more refined model based on Willis’. In conclusion, the results of this study offer several suggestions for language teaching professionals as providers of effective instruction of communication strategies for enhancing the development of communicative competence.

The review of previous studies on interlanguage pragmatics reveals that they have been modelled on cross-cultural pragmatics. However, in order for interlanguage pragmatics to contribute in the area of second language acquisition, it should examine how L2 pragmatic competence develops as L2 linguistic competence increases. Therefore, interlanguage pragmatics studies should be modelled on acquisitional pragmatics. As an effort to explore developmental features of pragmatic competence by linguistic proficiency, this study investigated the speech act behaviors of three linguistically distinctive groups. A total of 159 English learners, which consisted of high school 1st and 2nd graders, university freshmen, and university seniors, participated in this study. Their written responses to the 7 situations in the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) were analyzed in terms of response length, vocabulary, request forms, and the use of please. The three groups showed different behavioral patterns in the realization of requests and complaints, utilizing different linguistic strategies to be responsive to the social factors. For future research, expanding learner population to include very low and high level learners, developing a new research tool other than DCT, a more systematic grouping by linguistic proficiency were suggested.

The current study has two research questions: 1) Are EFL students’ ratings comparable with the advanced or native TESOL graduates’ ratings? 2) What are the significant variables that discriminate one self-marked proficiency group from another? To address question 1, 90 Korean EFL learners rated 3 sample essays on a 5-scale with four writing features (organization, content, language use, and holistic feature), Twenty-five TESOL graduates also rated the sample essays given the same scoring rubric. The students’ ratings then were compared to the ratings of TESOL graduates. To address research question 2, 100 students’ responses to 10 survey items were analyzed, using discriminant analysis (DA). The result showed 1) that significant difference were observed in a few analytic features between students’ ratings and colleagues’ ratings, and 2) that the students who marked themselves as high-proficient writers were likely to respond with confidence that their ratings were accurate. In conclusion, differing L2 proficiency level is partly, but not fully associated with rating performance in subjects who are able to read and comprehend English sentences. On the other hand, L2 proficiency influenced student raters’ perception.

Face-to-face interview format has been widely used to elicit English language samples in oral proficiency testing. It is desirable to replicate target language use situations in oral testing, and the direct testing format is believed to assess more authentic and interactive language abilities. However, it has been argued that speech samples from unstructured face-to-face interviews are quite different from those in natural communication settings. The purpose of this study was to understand the construct to be assessed through an unstructured face-to-face interview, which was adopted to an English speaking contest. Data from the English speaking contest were analyzed in terms of how they were different from the characteristics of naturally occurring conversations. It was found that the test construct in the English speaking contest did not reflect the features of natural conversation specifically in the areas of turn-taking, adjacency pairs, and topic nomination due to asymmetrical power relations between interviewer and interviewees. Therefore, it was suggested that we need to incorporate diverse discourse-based approaches into current speaking skill assessments, which can interpret spoken language data in many ways.

The purpose of this experimental study is threefold. First is to investigate how significantly EFL learner’s competence in the English pronoun as cohesive tie correlates with their reading proficiency. Second is to search for pedagogical implications for acquisition of the pronouns with reference to awareness-raising instruction. Third is to examine how narration variation affects EFL learners’ co-interpretative competence in the pronouns created in descriptive or direct speech narration. The subjects were grouped into two by pedagogical variable, i.e. awareness- raising instruction. Both control and experimental groups were given three tests: 1) house-made Toefl as pretest or norm test, and two post-tests: 2) Pronoun Test in which every pronoun was asked to be co-interpreted with its referents in the reading text; 3) Reading Proficiency Test constructed by a close technique. All the test scores were statistically processed in terms of t-test and the Pearson correlation. The statistics revealed a positively significant correlation (0.743 or 0.629) between EFL learners’ co-interpretive competence in the English pronoun and their reading proficiency. Furthermore, the impact of awareness- raising instruction turned out to be significant for co-interpretive competence and thus for reading proficiency. This experimental study concludes that higher competence in the pronoun corresponds to higher proficiency in reading. Thus acquisition of English pronouns must be facilitated at the discourse level by means of intra, inter, and intra-intersentential co-interpretation with their referents.