This paper aims to propose that Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is a method that can help meet the conditions in language learning and instruction. PBL was first used in medical education, where learners engaged in problem-solving activities that reflect the demands of real-life professional practice, thus promoting critical thinking in the content domain. The paper proposes that by applying PBL in language learning and creating situations in which learners work collaboratively on problems, the learners benefit in two respects: (i) they have the opportunity to practise the kind of thinking skills and problem-solving strategies needed in real life, and (ii) they engage in purposeful language activity with others through discussion and negotiation. The paper first provides a theoretical rationale far the use of PBL in language learning and suggests attendant changes in the role of a language instructor in a PBL context. The paper then presents an outline of the stages and components needed in designing an online PBL Unit far use in an undergraduate language class.

This paper is aimed to evaluate the communicative competence of Korean EFL learners through the Discourse Completion Tasks(DCT) analysis. The present study has three purposes. The first purpose is to analyse English textbooks on the basis of thanking strategies, apologizing strategies, and requesting and offering strategies presented in Aijmer(1996). The second purpose is to analyse the discourse completion data collected from Korean middle school students and university students. The third one is to suggest the discourse syllabus model for the 8th national curriculum in Korea.

The purpose of the present classroom research is to investigate teacher talk in the primary English classroom with special reference to teacher questions. The analysis of the recorded teacher questions reveals that the teacher asks a carefully structured sequence of questions leading to the clear pedagogical goals she has set: to encourage students to correct themselves; to find out what students know; to personalize the task; and to elicit culture talk. It is also shown that her use of display questions is supportive of learning; the teacher provides feedback in a way which is as communicative as possible in the context of the classroom and which facilitates the attainment of the pedagogical purposes. All these findings suggest that we consider how teacher talk may perform communicative functions in the classroom context rather terms defining communicative teacher talk purely in terms of the norms of communication outside the classroom.

The purpose of this article is to examine the role of similarity in the metaphor and simile preference and offer empirical evidence against the equivalence view of simile and metaphor. This evidence was obtained from two experiments to examine the correlation between the similarity ratings and the preference ratings. The results suggest that Korean people choose the metaphor form when the similarity of a target and a source increases, whereas they choose the simile form when the similarity of a target and a source decreases. The results from these experiments are consistent with Chiappe and Kennedy's (1999, 2001) findings. Moreover, the experiments found that Korean people were more likely to express particular comparisons as similes over metaphors than American people.

This article reports that a testee's content schemata have detrimental effects on the validity of standardized reading comprehension tests. in case that the reading passages constitute his prior background knowledge framed by regular academic pursuits focused on a major field of study. The empirical research findings on such a reliability issue have shown that the Korean subjects' familiarity with the content domain of the reading materials may substantially enhance their test performance, operated as unfair advantages over the other participants at the same level of English proficiency who do not possess technical knowledge closely related to the contents of the test passages. Based on these results, it may be argued that the reading text should be composed of maximally neutral contents to every testee to avoid the possible overlapping between a test-taker's content schemata and the content domain of the materials. Therefore, this article claims that the tenets of schema theory with its long-standing foundation on culturally predetermined content and formal schemata need to be expanded to cover professional knowledge structures, like those acquired by higher education, as the hard-wired framework of an individual's original culture-specific background knowledge.

This study investigated how different types of formal instruction affect the second language looming of English grammatical structure among Korean high-school students. The linguistic focus of the study was English present perfect, which often creates learning problems for Korean learners of English. Subjects were divided into a control group and an experimental group (Enhanced group). The input the subjects in the experimental group received was manipulated by visually enhancing (with highlighting of the target structures in a reading text). Learners' awareness of the rules throughout the treatment period, as well as accuracy of target structures was measured. Results indicated that subjects in the Enhanced group showed higher performance than the control group. Further, awareness of rules that learners developed over the treatment period did not provide any advantage in learning.

This study aims to probe for ideological construction within the linguistic structure of newspaper reporting. The study focuses on news reports relating the issue of new IOC chairman election in English version of four mainstream newspaper published in Korea: The Donga Daily News, The Jungang Daily News, The Chosun Daily News, and The Korea Times. The analysis of these reports adheres to the analytic paradigm of critical linguistic analysis and shows how the newspaper articulate conflicting ideological positions in their reports of new IOC chairman election. The analysis demonstrates how the event of new IOC chairman election is naturalized in racist accounts. This study is important for understanding the constructive nature of language practices. The study concludes with a discussion to explain the need for critical awareness in choosing right teaching material, considering that news reports are widely accepted as an authentic material for English education.

This paper, conducted within the GB framework, investigates inversion phenomena in the functional categories, Focalization Phrases and Topicalization Phrases. The leading idea of this paper is that formal feature checking in these two functional categories is mostly responsible for inversion in which either verb or auxiliary verbs appear in front of subjects and also it will try to find an answer to the following questions: "What are the features that trigger the inversion?" and "Can all the inversion constructions explained by Haegeman's Focalization & Topicalization?" My discussion is largely based on English inversion constructions such as wh-inversion, negative inversion, and adverbial inversion. Also I will show there are some problems in Topicalization and Focalization analysis to explain some inversion constructions and present Rizzi(1999)'s analysis for those problems.

This paper is aimed at the investigation of pragmatic contributions to the identification of explicatures. An explicature is the result of fleshing out the semantic representation of an utterance. The basic assumption of the paper is that the process of the developing the semantic representation into an explicature depends heavily on contextual information. Therefore, we are concerned with the way in which hearers use contextual information to flesh rut or develop the semantic representation of an utterance. The identification of explicatures includes both the recovery of the proposition expressed and the recovery of what we called higher-level explicatures. There are three subtasks involved in the recovery of the proposition expressed: reference assignment disambiguation and enrichment On the other hand, there are two subtasks involved in the recovery of higher-level explicatures: attitudes and speech acts.

This paper is to analyze how Walt Whitman developed the theme and structure of Leaves of Grass with his ideal of democratic vistas. Whitman established his identity as an inspired poet, having faith in the divinity of man based on transcendental belief. After being awakened to the transcendental truth, he practiced his own common world view--his democratic vistas. Whitman searched for the unity with nature and identified his self with "common man and his nation." The poetry expresses "cosmological and national ideology" dedicated to the creation of an ideal nation united in eternal freedom and peace. By portraying common cosmic and national theme in terms of his individual personality, he brought various paradoxical and controversial ideas into one thing, namely "democracy", fusing diversity into unity. As in the symbol of the grass, there is a unity in variety reflected by democracy in a cosmological and political compound. With the form of free verse, he could express his liberal unrestrained and mystical thoughts of democracy. This new form has been associated with the poet's strong consciousness of the need for modernization in his country. He willingly assumed "the role of prophet and public voice for American democrat" with the rolling catalogues and I-persona which formed a sense of the common man and common things of America. Whitman pioneered a democrat literature with simple and dynamic tone and style. He successively pursued the democratic vistas in his Leaves of Grass.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the theories concerning socioaffective strategies, to analyze the dialogues of the students negotiating for meaning of a reading material and to suggest some implications of socioaffective strategies for teaching reading. The examination of the theories - the interaction hypothesis and the sociocultural theory - suggest that the use of socioaffective strategies facilitates more effective understanding of information that is to be found. distributed, and taken in among the participants. The discourse analyses of the students' interaction in a Korean college English reading class show ample evidence of the use of socioaffective strategies that helped them understand the meaning of a text. However, the analyses show that the strategies are mostly used to ask questions concerning the meaning of clauses. Only few analytical questions are raised for some structural and pragmatical features in the text which are crucial to the understanding of its meaning. Imbalance also exists in the types of the questions used by the participants. The analyses indicate that, instead of negotiating more interactively, the students tend to rely upon a more advanced student when they face difficult English sentences. Therefore as a conclusion this paper emphasizes the importance of teaching socioaffective strategies to help students to help themselves to become more cooperative, independent and analytical in reading English texts.

Transitive relation and its directionality constitute the precondition for passivization, and the present study purports 10 unearth the true properties of transitivity in connection with the passive phenomena. The bottom line it drives at is this transitivity is a notion that can be best explained in 'cognitive' terms. The original direction of transitivity that is predicated by a verb can be reversed depending on the speaker's intention or the discourse situation. In the imperfective verb constructions transitivity can not be derived from only the content of the sentence itself and the predicate objectionally. That depends on the subjective interpretation of speaker considering the cognitive prototype of human to the various complicated situations.