• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.48
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• pp.223-252
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• 2017

This study explores effects of two types of chatbots - voice-based and text-based - on Korean EFL learners' speaking competence and learner perception. Participants were 80 freshmen students taking an English-speaking class at a university in Korea. They were divided into two experimental groups at random. During the sixteen-week experimental period, participants engaged in 10 chat sessions with the two different types of chatbots. To take a close examination of effects on the improvement of speaking competence, they took the TOEIC speaking test as pre- and post-tests. Structured questionnaire-based surveys were conducted before and after treatment to determine if there are changes in perception. Findings reveal two chatbots effectively contribute to improvement of speaking competence among EFL learners. Particularly, the voice-based chatbot was as effective as the text-based chatbot. An analysis of survey results indicates perception of chatbot-assisted language learning changed positively over time. In particular, most participants preferred voice-based chatbot over text-based chatbot. This study provides insight on the use of chatbots in EFL learning, suggesting that EFL teachers should integrate chatbot technology in their classrooms.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.73-80
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• 2019

The purpose of this study was to examine how flipped learning strategy affects learners' self-regulating ability in both general English and Spanish, based on the study hypothesis that self-regulating learning ability of general English learners will make a meaningful difference in comparison to that of traditional learning. The study was also focused on how flipped learning was related to learners' self-regulating ability. From September 10, 2018 to December 10, 2018, a total of 81 students in general English and Spanish were surveyed in which three sub areas of self-regulating learning (cognitive, motivational, and behavioral control) were considered, and which were divided into six sub-domains, a total of 65 items were composed. Although not very significant results were shown in the case of motivational control, both English and Spanish classes have statistically significant differences in cognitive and behavioral self-regulating learning abilities.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.426-435
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• 2021

This study aims to functionally classify lexical bundles appearing in academic papers on nuclear science and engineering written in English and then analyze the lexical bundles' characteristics compared to those appearing in general academic papers. To this end, the texts of nuclear science and engineering papers were collected and produced as a corpus(c. 1 mil. tokens). Then they were statistically compared through Chi-square tests and standardized residuals with the corpus of general academic papers(c. 750,000 tokens). The results revealed that, compared to general academic papers, the bundles in the stance lexical bundle category were mainly used among the functional lexical bundle in nuclear science and engineering. The use of the lexical bundles lacked much variety. The same type of lexical bundles was 're-used' and 'recycled'. Based on these research results, educational implications for English for Academic Purposes and the further direction of follow-up research were discussed and suggested.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.99-104
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• 2019

In an attempt to shed light on the effects of overseas internships on foreign language development, this study investigated the differences in English compositions written by 10 Korean university students who joined an overseas internship program for 15 weeks. For data collection, the participants each wrote an English composition before and after the internship. Data collected was analyzed to discern differences in the two writings, and statistical analyses were carried out of the results. Results showed that the participants appeared to have attained lexical fluency, generating longer sentences embedded with multisyllabic, more diverse types, more complex and less redundant words in more complicated structures after the internship. This study revealed that overseas internships facilitated the growth of linguistic abilities. Korean SMEs need to enhance the global capacity of their human resources via overseas internships to strengthen their global competitiveness, apart from improving their industrial competencies such as productivity and product quality.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.625-645
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• 2023

This study examined newspaper articles from 2012 to the first quarter of 2021 to explore how interest in and response to veganism have evolved in the fashion and beauty industries over the past decade. By analyzing keywords and word correlations, we discovered a steady increase in veganism-related articles in both English- and Korean-language newspapers published in Korea, especially since 2019. Since 2012, consumer interest in vegan fashion materials has grown, with fashion and beauty emerging in 2018 as significant vegan-related keywords. As a result, brands have adopted vegan certification systems and introduced vegan product lines, and new vegan brands have emerged. Since 2020, companies have been promoting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) management practices and working toward eco-management that reflects vegan trends in all areas, such as cruelty-free product/packaging materials, brands, policies, and services. It is also notable that fashion/beauty consumers have been more actively starting to adopt eco-friendly lifestyles and participate in vegan-related movements since that time. Our findings offer important insights into the evolution of veganism in Korea and can help researchers and industry practitioners to develop future business strategies in the vegan fashion and beauty industries.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.527-534
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• 2014

Motivated by the fact that English grapheme is realized as 5 different English vowels [ɑ, eɪ, æ, ɔ, ə], the present study aims to investigate how Korean students perceive and produce English grapheme in words. To this end, 31 university students participated in the perception and production tests on 28 English words containing grapheme . Overall, the participants performed better on production than perception both in the pretest and posttest. Also, the accuracy of perception and production was improved in the posttest. While the accuracy rates of [ɑ] and [eɪ] were among highest in the perception test, those of [ɑ] and [ɔ] were in the production test. By contrast, the accuracy of unstressed [ə] was worst both in perception and production. As for the training effect, [eɪ] and [æ] showed significant improvement both in perception and production. In addition, the perception and the production of [ɔ] were improved at the .051-4 significance level. However, the accuracies of [ɑ] improved significantly neither in perception nor in production. In the case of [ə], the production ability was improved significantly whereas the perception ability was not. The prominent error patterns of were the replacement of the target vowels with [æ], [ɑ], or [eɪ]. The influence of orthography was attested through the persistent occurrence of [ɑ]. Finally, pedagogical implications were discussed.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.36-46
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• 2007

This paper presents an automated English scoring system designed to help non-native speakers of English, Korean-speaking learners in particular. The system is developed to help the 3rd grade students in junior high school improve their English grammar skills. Without human's efforts, the system identifies grammar errors in English sentences, provides feedback on the detected errors, and scores the sentences. Detecting grammar errors in the system requires implementing a special type of rules in addition to the rules to parse grammatical sentences. Error production rules are implemented to analyze ungrammatical sentences and recognize syntactic errors. The rules are collected from the junior high school textbooks and real student test data. By firing those rules, the errors are detected followed by setting corresponding error flags, and the system continues the parsing process without a failure. As the final step of the process, the system scores the student sentences based on the errors detected. The system is evaluated with real English test data produced by the students and the answers provided by human teachers.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.15 no.10
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• pp.183-190
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• 2010

The present study attempted to identify the metacognitive strategies used by L2 writers at the university level as well as their particular aspects which might influence the use of these strategies. Twenty-seven participants, all of whom were enrolled in an English course, were asked to write an expository essay and then complete a questionnaire which includes their beliefs and attitudes toward L2 writing experience and the metacognitive strategies during the writing process. It was found that even though inexpert writers knew and employed as many strategies as the expert counterparts did, they were unsuccessful in the quality of their texts. Simply possessing a repertoire of metacognitive strategies was not enough for successful L2 writing. The failure of the inexpert writers to apply these metacognitive strategies in an effective manner was influenced by affective factors such as anxiety, self-confidence, self-concept, etc. As a result of this study, a pedagogical implication is suggested.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.143-157
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• 2022

The aim of this study is to design Spudsville, an immersive game environment in Minecraft that can effectively help learners acquire the English language. To create a successful learning experience using Minecraft, the researchers adopted the Agile Model and the Design Thinking approach. The researchers first conducted an analysis through an extensive literature review in order to assess the learners' needs. Afterwards, they designed and developed a Minecraft world based on the data collected during the analysis phase. The researchers learned that implementing constructivist and behaviorist approaches has benefits, even though applying a cognitivist-learning model to Spudsville could have provided the researchers with more insight on how learner processes information. Making these adjustments could improve Spudsville's effectiveness and could potentially help the ways in which gamified learning aids with language acquisition.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2010.05a
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• pp.953-955
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• 2010

Most domestic educational mobile contents put special stress on learning foreign languages such as English, and usually the telecommunications companies and the education companies partner to provide mobile terminals with the contents such as video files. Recently the trend of mobile platforms for the educational contents have been changed because of the release the many kinds of smart phones like iPhone and Google Phone. In this paper, we design the educational contents for Korean listening education to aid to study Korean effectively as a foreign language. It carries out a detailed design to realize and run the contents based on the Android OS which is an open source platform backed by Google.