English has become an important language of science and scholarship due to the globalization and internationalization of higher education. As a result, there has been a rapid increase in English-mediated instruction (EMI) courses across English as a foreign language (EFL) countries. In an expansion of EMI courses, different reactions have arisen among professors between Korean and Nordic higher education contexts. Utilizing both literature search on EMI as well as insights from the researcher’s involvement in EMI projects, this article presents a comparative analysis of EMI between Korean and Nordic universities with the hope that it will contribute to more effective implementation of EMI within EFL universities such as the ones in Korea. The analysis demonstrates that although there are similar concerns about the expansion and implementation of EMI, the two contexts have fundamental differences, including the motivation for the introduction of EMI, linguistic environments, and philosophy of teaching and learning. These factors are intertwined and influence the implementation of EMI in each context. Therefore, in order to implement EMI more successfully in Korean universities, understanding the differences underlying the two contexts is required.

Yu, Kyong-Ae. 2017. “Perceptions and Functions of Korean Mianhada: Comparison with American English Sorry”. The Sociolingusitc Journal of Korea 25(2), 197~224. Sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic conventions for apology vary from culture to culture. While the illocutionary purpose of apologizing in English is “the speaker's sense of social obligation” (Wierzbicka 1987: 215~217) and Japanese sumimasen involves “social-self with a social alter” (Ide 1998: 524), this study argues that Korean mianhada is an apology from the speaker's moral perspective linked with collective-self. Employing Wierzbicka's (1987) Natural Semantic Metalanguage, this study discusses that sorry is a separate concept but mianhada is a nebulous concept mixed with other emotions, e.g., thank and love. In addition, presenting the examples from corpus-based dictionaries, COCA, and the Sejong 21st Century Corpus, this study discusses that sorry is authentically used as indirect and ritualistic apologies while mianhada is used as direct, indirect, ritualistic and substantive apologies. Finally, distinguishing main functions of mianhada into a sincere apology, a pseudo-apology, gratitude, a request initiator, a preclosing signal, and a territory invasion signal to strangers, this study provides cultural and ethnographical explanations.

Despite previous research on the use of the first-person pronoun in academic writing, it has rarely been studied in L2 writing and learner corpus research. In this study, the pronoun I was analyzed and compared between native speaking (NS) and Korean nonnative speaking (NNS) corpora of English argumentative writing samples. To identify differences in its discourse functions, three categories (essay commentator, experience provider and opinion provider) were formulated. The findings show that the normalized frequency of the pronoun was higher in the learner corpus. However, the pronoun occurred less frequently within individual essays but was found in more essays. Unlike the NS corpus, the opinion provider occurs more frequently than the experience provider in the learner corpus. For the opinion provider, Korean students usually selected the verb think. The present study suggests the need to develop students’ awareness of the discursive usage of the pronoun and expand their repertoire of metadiscursive devices.

This study aims to investigate differences between task-based learning and teaching (TBLT) and storytelling-based learning and teaching (SBLT), focusing on teaching interaction in Korean elementary schools. The present study is motivated by the realization of the effects of teaching English by telling stories in comparison with TBLT, which has been effectively implemented in language classrooms. This study investigates eight task-based classrooms and eight storytelling-based classrooms in conjunction with teacher interviews. The findings indicate that frequencies of teacher talk and L1 interaction are significantly higher in TBLT than those in SBLT, and frequencies of other utterance types are significantly different between the two. These distinctions result in the two main interaction patterns for TBLT and SBLT, respectively. In addition, the interviews with teachers indicate that the atmosphere of TBLT classroom interaction has a tendency to be competent, and that of SBLT has a tendency to be enjoyable.

This paper aims to compare generic features of a specific genre in Korean and English language. For this purpose, written advertisements from magazines in two languages were compiled and small corpora of equivalent genres were analyzed from a perspective of comparative genre analysis. The focus of analysis was given to the ‘lexical’, ‘structural’, and ‘other choices’, by exploring the discourse values within a specific context. The case is to raise foreign language learners’ awareness of language form within a meaningful context, represented in a relevant genre. In this study, the comparison is narrowed down to written advertisements through cross-linguistic comparison. It shows that comparative corpora of familiar genres can be used to help learners realize the ways FL is explored to achieve particular communicative goals. Furthermore, it can lead naturally to the discussion of cultural and social aspects reflected in the language.

The quasi-experimental study was designed to compare effects of two telecollaborative learning models, asynchronous (ATL) and synchronous telecollaboration learning (STL), on Korean elementary school students’ motivation, anxiety, and intercultural communicative competence (ICC). To evaluate the 27 participants’ motivation and anxiety level, a pre-test and a post-test were administered and the motivation level and the anxiety level were compared between the ATL and the STL group. On the completion of the project, to examine their ICC development, the participants were interviewed by the researcher with questions constructed based on five objectives of Byram’s intercultural competence. The results are as follows: (1) The two groups did not show any significant differences in increase their motivation level. However, when examining in more detail, the participants in ATL increased their instrumental motivation while those in STL increased their integrative motivation. (2) There was no significant difference in anxiety level between the two groups. At last, (3) regarding ICC development, the participants both in the ATL and in the STL greatly improved their knowledge, attitude, and skills, but ATL participants, compared to STL participants, demonstrated relatively limited changes in their critical cultural awareness. Implications to enhance elementary school students’ motivation and ICC by telecollaboration are suggested.