We explored whether task complexity, operationalized by the two types of writing prompts, affects EFL high school students’ narrative writing in terms of syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, fluency, cohesion, and text quality. 32 intermediate EFL students who were randomly assigned to two prompt groups completed a written narrative task based on a series of sixteen pictures. Task complexity was operationalized as a bare versus frame prompt. The results indicate that the task complexity had an impact on lexical sophistication measures. The students in the framed prompt group were able to include more sophisticated vocabulary in their narratives than those in the bare prompt group. The findings are discussed in terms of the Limited Attentional Capacity Model in that the students in the bare prompt group might have prioritized meaning rather than form in order to ease attentional overload. The findings of our study could assist teachers in selecting writing prompts that have the potential to elicit the targeted features of writing performance.

The study investigated the effects of recasts and prompts on learning language forms that arose incidentally in dyadic interaction, focusing on the degree of explicitness of each type of feedback and learner proficiency levels. The data were collected from 64 beginning and upper-intermediate English learners of Korean. Thirty-one beginning learners were randomly assigned to a feedback group and to a control group, and thirtythree upper-intermediate learners were also assigned to a feedback group and to a control group. Each learner was paired with an English speaker and worked on a picture-sequencing task. The learners in the feedback groups received recasts or prompts on their erroneous utterances while the learners in the control groups did not. The effects of feedback were measured by pre-interaction picture descriptions and immediate and delayed post-interaction correction tasks. The study found that both recasts and prompts had some effects on learning the targeted forms, and more explicit forms of each feedback resulted in a higher rate of correction. The beginning learners took more advantages of recasts relative to the upper-intermediate learners, and explicit prompts worked better for the upper-intermediate learners. The effects of prompts sustained longer than recasts in both levels.

Increased intracellular levels of Ca2+ are generally thought to negatively regulate lipolysis in mature adipocytes, whereas store-operated Ca2+ entry was recently reported to facilitate lipolysis and attenuate lipotoxicity by inducing lipophagy. Transient receptor potential mucolipin1 (TRPML1), a Ca2+-permeable non-selective cation channel, is mainly expressed on the lysosomal membrane and plays key roles in lysosomal homeostasis and membrane trafficking. However, the roles of TRPML1 in lipolysis remains unclear. In this study, we examined whether the channel function of TRPML1 induces lipolysis in mature adipocytes. We found that treatment of mature adipocytes with ML-SA1, a specific agonist of TRPML1, solely upregulated extracellular glycerol release, but not to the same extent as isoproterenol. In addition, knockdown of TRPML1 in mature adipocytes significantly reduced autophagic flux, regardless of ML-SA1 treatment. Our findings demonstrate that the channel function of TRPML1 partially contributes to lipid metabolism and autophagic membrane trafficking, suggesting that TRPML1, particularly the channel function of TRPML1, is as therapeutic target molecule for treating obesity.

The present study aims to explore the factors affecting Korean EFL high school students’ choice of picture options with key expressions in a writing test prompt, as well as the effects of option position and contents on their performance. It further aims to examine whether these effects vary with English writing proficiency. The performance of lower- and higher-level students in two prompts was analyzed along with their reasons for their choices. The prompt had three picture options with two key expressions in each option; the students chose one picture option and wrote a 20-word message declining a request using a reason specified in the option. Significant effects were not found for position within the prompts, but for the content of the options. The participants tended to choose a certain picture option over others mainly because of topical knowledge, difficulty level, or picture preference. The findings suggest a significant effect of picture contents, which yields implications for designing prompts with picture options for score validity.

This present study concerned whether prompts and recasts that occur during interaction could play a role in L2 development. Adopting an untimed grammatical judgment test and an elicited oral imitation test to measure explicit and implicit knowledge, this study examined the relative effects of prompts and recasts on L2 development of past tense forms. The participants were pre-intermediate learners enrolled in English as a foreign language (EFL) classes at a university in Korea. The learners were assigned to two prompt groups, a recast group, and a control group. The analysis of the untimed grammaticality judgment test revealed that the participants promoted their explicit knowledge of the past tense forms of regular and irregular verbs when prompts were provided. The analysis also showed that the learners who received recasts improved their test scores but only in irregular past tense forms. No significant group difference was found among the treatment groups and the control group in the results of the elicited oral imitation test used to measure implicit knowledge of the target forms. These results indicated that prompts were beneficial for short-term L2 grammatical learning of EFL learners of pre-intermediate level. The implications and limitations are discussed in terms of the role of prompts in driving L2 development.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of prompt types on EFL learners’ writing performance. 6 university students and 10 university students were provided with bare and prose prompts and the fluency of their writings was measured by analyzing the length of product (word count) and mean length of T-units (MLTU) was used to measure syntactic complexity. Furthermore, independent T-tests were administered in addition to qualitative analysis in order to determine whether the differences between the two types of prompts were significant. The results showed that while high school students’ writing wrote longer texts and had higher MLTU on the prose prompt than the bare prompt, a large portion of their writing was copied from the prompt when they were provided with the prose prompt. The university students’ writing showed that they wrote longer texts and had higher MLTU on the bare prompt than the prose prompt. In addition, they had responded after the test that they were able to write more freely when they were given the bare prompt. The findings of this study suggest that test developers need to consider the effects of prompt types and examine the quality of the writings more carefully.