Cho, Eun & Oh, Sun-Young. (2023). “Representation of Native English Teachers and Korean English Teachers in Korean English Newspapers: A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 31(2). 95-123. Native-speakerism, a pervasive issue in the field of English Language Teaching, is observed globally and prevalent in Korea. This ideology negatively affects both Native English Teachers (NETs) and Non-native English teachers like Korean English Teachers (KETs) for some reasons. This study utilizes corpus-based critical discourse analysis to examine the linguistic patterns and referential expressions used in Korean English newspapers to represent NETs and KETs. The analysis reveals significant disparities in their positions and authority within Korean English classrooms. Specifically, NETs are labeled as “assistants,” implying a subordinate role with limited authority, while KETs are referred to as “co-teachers,” signifying a more secure status. Moreover, the study highlights the challenges faced by KETs in demonstrating their English proficiency and sheds light on the discrimination faced by NETs who possess commodified linguistic capital and are of Caucasian descent. These findings emphasize the importance of raising awareness of native-speakerism in Korean newspapers.

In recent years, an array of studies has focused on ‘translationese’ (i.e., unique features that manifest in translated texts, causing second language (L2) writings to be similar to translated texts but different from native language (L1) writings). This intriguing linguistic pattern has motivated scholars to investigate potential markers for predicting the divergence of L1 and L2 texts. This study builds on this work, evaluating the feature importance ranking of specific translationese markers, including standardized type-token ratio (STTR), mean sentence length, bottom-frequency words, connectives, and n-grams. A random forest model was used to compare these markers in L1 and L2 academic journal article abstracts, providing a robust quantitative analysis. We further examined the consistency of these markers across different academic disciplines. Our results indicate that bottom-frequency words are the most reliable markers across disciplines, whereas connectives show the least consistency. Interestingly, we identified three-word lexical bundles as discipline-specific markers. These findings present several implications and open new avenues for future research into translationese in L2 writing.

Despite the massive impact of COVID-19 on society, beyond the numbers of confirmed cases and deaths, there remains a lack of large-scale data depicting the effects of the virus on the society of the Republic of Korea. To fill this gap, we collected 1.822 million news articles with more than 1 billion morphemes from January 2020 to June 2022, creating a Korean version of the Coronavirus Corpus. This corpus is introduced in the current study. In addition, to demonstrate how such massive corpus can be utilized, we conducted information theoretical analyses to see how the stance of the press media on topics such as vaccines and social distancing affected the COVID-19 situation in the Republic of Korea. Specifically, we utilized several computational linguistic skills including concordance building and sentiment analysis through both traditional and machine learning techniques and measured the transfer entropy to estimate the impact with information theory. The results suggest that the overall impact of the press media on the society was minimal to non-existent.

This study employed a bibliometric method to visualize the evolution of corpus-based discourse studies between 1995 and 2019, with a total of 2,174 English-language documents and their 83,184 references collected from Scopus, the Social Science Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Co-citation analysis of the predominant authors, references, and publication sources disclosed that the field has expanded over the past 25 years from primary pattern analysis of descriptive and functional grammar to principal investigations of interdisciplinary issues, some of which are central to pragmatics and sociolinguistics. This shift of research focus is also evidenced by keyword analysis. Scholars have been progressively more fascinated by such social issues as news discourse, business discourse, gender and language, and identity. Some emerging topics like social media, media discourse, legal discourse, and the metadiscourse interpersonal model may represent research hotspots and trends in this area. Bibliometric approaches play an important role in providing hands-on evidence-based comparisons and visualizations of previous research outputs using different time bands.

English globalization entails the use of English by speakers from mother tongues other than English. Trained and professional non-native speakers of English have reportedly achieved communicative competence owing to bilingual or multilingual experiences. Their pragmatic competence developed through diverse interactions with speakers from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Kecskes 2015). In this study, hedges were explored in international briefings where English was used as a lingua franca by professionals of an organization. Three hedging devices including modal verbs, modal adverbs, and pronouns were analyzed to investigate their pragmatic competence. In addition, the professional non-native English briefings were compared with the U.S. briefings for their similarities and differences. Results showed developmental patterns from learner English while they shared similarities with native data. These findings were accounted for by the varieties of English and the genre differences. Implications for pragmatic competence are discussed as well.

This study explored the effects of outlining on the summaries of thirty six L2 college students across three text genres and their opinions on the use of outlining in writing the summaries. Over the eight weeks, the students were divided into an outlining group (experimental group) and a keyword group (controlled group) wrote three summaries after reading articles across three genres (e.g. argumentative, expository, and narrative) at two weeks intervals. Additionally, a follow-up questionnaire on the use of outlining in writing summaries was conducted. Data were analyzed by the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010) under 14 indices, and the responses to the questionnaire were analyzed by percentages. The results found a statistically significant difference appearing only in the aspect of CT (i.e. clause per T-unit). In addition, a majority of students utilizing outlining for summary writing believed that they were helped not only to understand the contents and the structure of the articles, but to write summaries with their own words. These results have a pedagogical meaning in that outlining can be more efficient for specific reading genres when teaching summarization in L2 classes.

This study investigated the structural and functional differences between formulaic sequences in College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) and SAT reading assessment texts. The results of the RANGE program showed that SAT used more diverse and difficult words compared to CSAT. The frequency analysis revealed that CSAT used more formulaic sequences than the SAT counterpart. This suggests that CSAT used more repeated expressions, whereas SAT used diverse vocabulary items. The structural analysis showed that noun phrases were the most dominant in CSAT, whereas prepositional phrases were pervasive in SAT. The functional analysis showed that both corpora relied heavily on referential expressions. The results indicate that referential bundles are dominantly used in institutional writing (Biber & Barbieri, 2007). In accordance with the previous studies, the results suggest that high frequency formulaic sequences can be different according to the register. In CSAT, connectives and discourse organizers were prevalent. This may be due to the characteristics of question types in CSAT. The results may indicate that formulaic sequences in texts are partly influenced by the characteristics of a register.

This study investigated the use of the amplifier very in high school English textbooks and native corpora by comparing its frequency distributions and collocation patterns. The native corpora, used as the reference of the study, were COCA and BNC, with their built-in sub-corpora further grouped into spoken and written corpora. The High School English Textbook Corpus (HSETC) was compiled from a total of 53 high school textbooks, with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S) from the texts in listening and conversation and the written corpus (HSETC-W) from the reading passages. Analyses using AntConc3.4.4 revealed no prominent differences between HSETC and reference corpora in the frequency of the amplifier very, while the written corpus (HSETC-W) had more occurrences contrary to the native corpora. The combination patterns and their occurrences of HSETC were slightly different from those of COCA and BNC with the gap increased with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S). Pedagogical implications and suggestions are made on ELT materials development and teaching practices.

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.

The present study examines the features of communicative functions in middle school English textbooks, identifying whether or not they are presented based on the spiral structure. It also compares the communicative functions of 15 different middle school English textbooks and investigates whether the National English Listening Tests (NELTs) reflect the communicative functions presented in the textbooks. Two corpora were compiled using the 15 middle school English textbooks and the NELTs, and they were analyzed using WordSmith Tools. The results show that all the textbooks included communicative functions that the National Curriculum recommends; however, the textbooks presented a limited number of functions. Nonetheless, the communicative functions were presented relatively in a spiral way. The majority number of communicative functions in the textbooks and the NELTs were similar to each other, but there were some functions in the tests that were not covered in the textbooks. These results imply that more diverse communicative functions should be included in textbooks in order to help improve students’ communicative competence. The communicative functions not presented in the textbooks should not be included in the NELTs.

Lee, Jung-yull. 2017. “Pragmatic Functions of Amplifiers as Response Devices in Spoken American English: A Corpus-Based Analysis”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(2), 103~130. The verbal behaviors of amplifiers such as very much, really, pretty, particularly, very, absolutely, totally, quite are frequently represented in descriptions of interactions between speaker and hearer. The input of the main speakers was principally explicated with regard to semantic features, including collocational restrictions, by many linguists in the past. However, this study focuses on the output of hearers in different types of talk, especially elaborating on a wide variety of pragmatic roles of the amplifiers in spoken American English. For example, the amplifiers in hearers' speech play diverse pragmatic functions as bridging devices, by indicating surprise, repair, agreement, reinforcement, enthusiasm, encouragement, satisfaction, and rapport between interlocutors. Throughout the analysis, this study suggests that although these amplifiers do not ostensibly seem to have big meanings, they play significant roles in spoken discourse.

Bang, Minhee. 2016. “A Corpus Analysis of Representation of Mothers in the South Korean Press: collocates of 엄마 (mom)”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 24(3). 157~189. This study analyses the main lexical collocates of 엄마 (eomma: mom) in the corpus of the South Korean newspapers from 1990 to 2015. The collocates are grouped to see what semantic themes can be found in constructing discourse on motherhood, Firstly, 엄마 collocates most frequently with 아이 (ai: child) accounting for average 10.44% of all occurrences of eomma, while only 1.38% of the instances of the English counterpart mom(s) occurs with the English equivalents of 아이 in the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). Secondly, there is a host of collocates referring to body parts and denoting physical closeness, conveying a sense of emotional intimacy and bond between a mother and a child. Thirdly, there are collocates denoting motherly love and care, juxtaposed with collocates denoting absence and suffering of mothers. Portraying mothers as a sacrificing caregiver while problematising their absence as a threat to children’s welfare positions women as having sole responsibility for child care. Lastly, there is a group of collocates related to education, reflecting the Korean zeal for education. The analysis of the collocate 엄마표 (eommapyo: mom-made) reveals how the responsibility of childcare and education is reduced to the personal and individual issue, with mothers being construed as a main agent of facilitating children’s academic success.

Previous research developed lists of the most frequently used phrasal verbs in native English corpora. This study aims to discover how these high frequency phrasal verbs were presented in high school English textbooks in Korea. A high school English textbook corpus comprising 189,203 words taken from the listening scripts and reading passages of eight different textbook series was developed for the study. A corpus-based analysis of phrasal verbs revealed that each textbook series covered only 30% of most commonly used phrasal verbs in native corpora. In addition, the phrasal verbs used in the different textbook series rarely overlapped, suggesting a lack of systematic selection process. Among the recursive phrasal verbs appearing in the textbook series, high frequency phrasal verbs were more likely to be recursive and evenly distributed. A comparative analysis conducted with a referential corpus revealed that the textbooks employed fewer phrasal verbs than their comparative counterparts. In terms of meaning, 91% of high frequency phrasal verbs in the textbooks delivered their most frequent meanings while the rest 9% did not. The results of this study support the necessity of pedagogical guidelines for phrasal verbs.

This study mainly explores the research themes and topics of corpus-based studies published in English Teaching in an attempt to provide future directions and pedagogical implications in this research domain. For the purposes of the study, a total of 42 corpus-based research articles published in English Teaching were reviewed and analyzed in terms of research topics, methodology, and characteristics of the corpora employed in the studies. The thematic and topical analysis of the corpus-based studies showed that much research, i.e., 64%, has focused on the analysis ofvocabulary items. Further, the analysis of the research methods revealed that corpus-based studies published in English Teaching mainly employed quantitative methods to describe frequency and distribution information of the target linguistic items. It also provided the description of the characteristics of the corpora adopted in the corpus-based research. Interestingly, many corpus-based studies published in English Teaching focused on the analysis of the learner corpus data. The paper discusses the future research directions and pedagogical implications for corpus-based studies on TEFL.

This paper investigated the use of of, the most frequently occurring preposition, in essays written by 416 matriculants at a Korean university. The learner corpus consisting of these essays contained 1,250 tokens of of, and these tokens were first analyzed according to their functions, i.e., integrative, separative, idiomatic, and others, adapted from Lindstromberg’s (2010) categorization of the functions of of. To ascertain what types of errors were made regarding of, the 46 tokens of of identified as errors were further categorized as addition, misordering, misformation, or wrong position. Of these four categories, addition was found to be the most frequently occurring type of error (31 of the 46 tokens), while wrong preposition and misformation accounted for ten and three tokens, respectively. No tokens of misordering were found, however. Also noteworthy is the finding that, albeit occurring mostly in simple constructions and basic functions, of was used accurately in over 95% of all the tokens found in the learner corpus.

본 연구의 목적은 웨슬리 설교에 나타난 ‘love’를 포함하는 표현들을 분석하고, 이에 대한 교육적 시사점을 찾는 데에 있다. 이를 위하여 죤 웨슬리의 설교 중에 20편이 선정되었다. 콘코던스 프로그램은 AntConc 3.2.0w이 사용되었다. 설교들로부터 워드리스트가 추출되었고, ‘love’ 단어를 포함한 표현들을 조사하였다. 결과로는, 199개의 표현이 발견되었고, 그 연어들의 특징적인 부분을 분석하였다. 본 연구의 결과는 학습자들로 하여금 연어적 지식을 발전시키는 데에 도움을 줄 수 있으며, 영어학습에 있어서 어휘를 확장시킬 수 있게 해 준다. 학습자들은 또한 교수자의 지도하에 스스로 코퍼스 프로그램을 이용할 수도 있겠다.

This study aims to evaluate the practicality and reliability of the selection of derivational forms in Korean National Curriculum of English and examines the effect of the derivational regulation on government-authorized English textbooks used in middle and high school. The current National Curriculum issued the guideline for vocabulary use and selection in the textbooks and regulated derived words with 11 affixes not counted as new words (Chang, 2007). For the research, suffixed word list was developed based on high frequency 14,000 word families in BNC (Nation, 2004) and it was loaded onto the RANGE (Heatley & Nation, 2002). By using the developed suffix analysis tool, 28 newly revised textbooks from middle and high school curriculum were analyzed and three corpora including Brown Corpus, Open American National Corpus (OANC), and L2 corpus were investigated to suggest improved regulation of derivational forms. As a result, the guideline for the derivational regulation in the Curriculum is found to require more consistent research. For the purpose, four levels of graded suffixes were suggested for the future English curriculum revision.

A vast amount of research has now established that writer-reader interaction is embodied in written texts through various linguistic devices. Among them, modalization plays a key role as a strategy for constructing the interaction in text. The impetus for this study is that it allows a new perspective to cross-cultural comparison between English and Korean texts. Based on contextual analysis of 356 British and Korean newspaper science popularizations with the two pairs of analytical categories that show how directly the writer performs the interaction with the reader (Types DI and II) and how strongly the writer commits him/herself to propositions (Types S and W), this paper argues that the discoursal preferences in the interactive use of modalization by the two groups of authors seem to be a reflection of the different orientations to human relations in British and Korean societies: equality-orientation in Britain and hierarchy-orientation in Korea.