In today’s digital era, tablets are gaining popularity as reading devices. However, few studies have compared reading e-books on tablets with reading printed books and regular classroom instruction for language learning. To evaluate the role of tablets in reading and analyze the possibilities, the current study examined 97 elementary school students learning English as a foreign language in South Korea. These students were taught English once or twice a week for 11 weeks based on extensive reading using tablets (n = 42), printed books (n = 32), or regular textbook-based instruction as control (n = 23). The results indicate that literal level reading comprehension was improved the largest in the tablet group compared with the other groups. By contrast, improvements in inferential reading comprehension and grammatical knowledge were greater in those reading printed books than in the tablet group. The findings suggest that the print medium was superior for deep reading and digital texts were better for quick and shallow learning.

Because English grammar consists of a long list of features, it is impractical to include all of them in a single grammar test. It would be useful to identify among all those features the best indicators of students’ grammatical knowledge and ability so that we could focus on what were the most representative knowledge and skills and simplify grammar assessment. This study is a preliminary, small-scale attempt to do just that. It surveyed 72 high school teachers and 129 Grade 12 students on their opinions of which features of grammar best represented grammatical knowledge and ability. They were asked to choose five indicators, including the best one, and provide reasons for thinking so. The relative pronoun was selected most frequently as the best indicator of grammatical knowledge and ability, followed by subject-verb agreement, the subjunctive, to-infinitives, and participles. This paper does not claim these five features to definitively represent the best indicators; further research should be conducted.

This study attempted to investigate the relative contribution of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge to second language reading comprehension ability. With 44 EFL adult learners whose language proficiency fell within the low-intermediate level, three different measures were conducted: vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were measured by researcher-developed tests and L2 reading comprehension was measured using the reading section of the TOEIC test. In order to examine the two predicting variables (i.e., vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) a multiple regression analysis was performed. The study found that both grammatical and vocabulary knowledge related significantly to L2 reading comprehension. Additionally, vocabulary knowledge showed a slightly stronger contribution to reading comprehension than syntactic knowledge. These findings suggest that it is equally important for lower level readers to understand vocabulary as well as basic syntactic rules and structures when it comes to EFL reading comprehension.

외국어로서의 한국어 교육의 일차적인 목표는 의사소통 능력을 향상시키는 것이다. 의사소통 능력이란 말하기와 듣기, 읽기와 쓰기까지 포함하기에 어느 것 하나 소홀히 할 수 없다. 하지만 최근 한국어 교육에서 읽기와 쓰기의 연구는 짧고, 구체적인 쓰기 교육에 대한 방안도 부족한 실정이다. 또한 유창성의 흐름에 따라 학습자들이 말하기보다 쓰기 실력은 그 아래 단계에 머무는 한계가 드러나고 있다. 본고에서는 그 해결책의 하나로 문법지식을 활용한 일기쓰기를 제안하고자한다. 일기는 학습자들의 경험을 토대로 생각과 느낌을 표현하게 해 주면서 말하기를 확대시키는 도구가 되기도 한다. 또한 문법지식을 활용한 일기쓰기 연습을 통해 오류를 최소화하고 다음 단계로 나아갔을 때 정확하고 안정된 표현을 사용할 수 있도록 도움을 줄 것이다. 따라서 직접 학습자들에게 실험을 통해서 그 효과를 확인하고자 한다.