• 영어어문교육
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• 제12권1호
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• pp.29-54
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is two-fold: first, to examine the current status of e-dictionary use in Korea and the attitude toward its use by Korean college students; second, to investigate to what degree e-dictionaries may be useful and effective tools in helping to improve learners' overall English skills. The subjects were 84 college students and they were divided into two groups: the experiment group and the control group. The instrument employed was the Preliminary Student Usage Questionnaire, which was developed by the researcher, together with the questionnaire survey developed by Koyama and Takeuchi (2004), which was modified for the study. The findings from this research are as follows: First, a special instruction session on how to use e-dictionaries made a statistically significant difference among users of the dictionaries. Those subjects who had received the instruction displayed a more positive attitude toward the use of e-dictionaries. Second, the experiment group showed a more favorable attitude toward the use of e-dictionaries. On the basis of the above results, the researcher suggests that proper guidance on the use of e-dictionaries and their benefits should have a positive influence on users. The findings from the current research will shed light on the current status of electronic dictionary use among Korean college students.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.263-291
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• 2003

This paper is to help the students in elementary schools develop and improve their English listening and speaking skills by presenting effective teaching and learning techniques using puppetry. It is absolutely obvious that listening and speaking are very important skills for most EFL students. Using puppets in the classroom is a creative English teaching technique which can involve authentic, communicative language situations. Moreover, puppets appeal to children and can aid in lowering affective filters thereby creating a more comfortable learning environment. The study clearly showed that using puppets is feasible and enjoyable in elementary English classes. However, caution must be exercised in drawing and generalizing conclusions from this experience. The results of the experiment are as follows: First, using puppetry in the English class was found to have positive influence on students' affective domains (interst, attitude). Second, using puppets in the English classes was found to be efficient for improving students' English listening and speaking skills. Third, appropriate materials should be selected and well thought-out plans should be made to be successful English class using puppetry. Perhaps the most interesting line of future research is to use qualitative research to examine the effect of this technique on the teacher variable. Further research is recommended, especially on using puppetry for speaking proficiency and creating affectively comfortable learning atmospheres.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.109-132
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• 2003

The purpose of the present study is to explore effective ways of teaching English grammar, which is geared toward improving students' communicative competence. Grammatical competence is essential to communicative competence. Grammatical knowledge cannot be acquired unconsciously in an EFL environment such as in Korea. Therefore learners should be given grammar instruction. More importantly, they should be instructed in grammar so that they can develop their grammatical abilities which are the foundation of communicative competence. The following is proposed for the grammar instruction placing the focus on improving communicative competence. First, it is effective to explain the form, meaning and pragmatics of a grammatical rule to learners in Korean. Second, learners should be given instruction in grammatical patterns that deals with constructions and meanings together, which can enable them to produce sentences by themselves. Third, it should be taught to understand constructions and meanings on the basis of word orders. Then the following steps of grammar instruction are suggested. In the first step of grammatical instruction, students should be provided with the illustrations of grammatical structures which link communicative functions and grammar. In the second step, learners should be gotten to practice grammatical constructions repeatedly enough to use them unconsciously. Lastly, communicative activities such as description and role plays should be included in grammar instruction to integrate grammar practice and communicative language use.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.77-98
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• 2005

The purpose of the study is to investigate whether focus-on-form instruction is effective in promoting accuracy in writing and to make some suggestions regarding education in business English writing. For this purpose, an experiment, of which the participants were 29 college sophomores taking a course in business English, was made. The learners received instruction in the English nouns followed by modificatory phrases or clauses through the focus-on-form techniques, feedback and explicit explanation. The results were as follows: First, the learners who received focus-on-form instruction improved accuracy in writing. Second, there was a correlation between the learners' English proficiency levels and the effects of focus-on-form instruction. Third, the high level learners showed more positive attitude toward focus-on-form instruction than the low level ones. To promote accuracy in written business communication, the following suggestions were made on the basis of the results: First, focus-on-form instruction should be incorporated into a content-based business English class. Second, repeated focus-on-form instruction is needed. Third, learners' English proficiency levels should be taken into account when focus-on-form instruction is given.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제12권3호
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• pp.123-145
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to propose an efficient vocabulary assessment model in task-based language learning and to verify the viability of this assessment model. Bachman and Palmer (1996) pointed out the fact that many language tests focus on just one of the areas of language knowledge. However, researchers suggested that it is necessary to acknowledge the needs of several analytic scales, which can provide separate ratings for different components of the language ability to be tested. Although there were many studies which tried to evaluate the various aspects of vocabulary ability, most of them measured only one or two factors. Based on previous research, this study proposed an assessment model of general construct of vocabulary ability and tried to measure vocabulary ability in four separate areas. The subjects were two classes of university level Korean EFL students. They participated in small group discussion via synchronous CMC. One class used a lexically focused task, which was proposed by Kim and Jeong (2006) and the other class used a non-lexically focused task. The results showed that the students with a lexically focused task significantly outperformed those with a non-lexically focused task in overall vocabulary ability as well as four subdivisions of vocabulary ability. In conclusion, the assessment model of separate ratings is a viable measure of vocabulary ability and this can provide elaborate interpretation of vocabulary ability.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.155-177
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• 2005

In the EFL context, Korean students don't have enough opportunities to directly experience the target culture, prompting the need to offer some well-organized culture education in class. The goals of this study are to analyze how many cultural contents are reflected in High School English textbooks and to suggest an implication for cultural learning. These textbooks were carefully examined, focusing on the cultural contents, by four categories: 'cultural skill section', 'cultural patterns', 'related language skills', and 'target countries'. The results of the analysis were like the following: First, although many of the textbooks are dealing with the culture skill sections, their contents were still wanting consistency and were small in quantity. Second, as for the cultural patterns, the pages dealing with behavioral culture were 43%, spiritual culture, 35.7%, material culture, 21.3%. Third, as for the related language skills, the cultural contents in the textbooks were organized in the order of listening, reading, speaking, writing, and cultural skill sections. Since it is impossible to separate language skills from culture, we suggest that the aspects of target culture should be incorporated in various forms into the learning situations. Fourth, as for the issue of target countries, the contents about the general or whole English culture were insufficient. So we suggest that English textbooks should play an essential role in providing students with various cultural information about various English speaking countries.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제16권1호
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• pp.209-233
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• 2009

Many difficult literary texts have been disregarded by the teachers as well as the students in the EFL context. The abridged version, however, has its pedagogical usability when viewed as an extension of the literary text like movies and comic strips. Legible abridgments boost up the critical mind among the learners by enhancing their involvement in responding more actively to each class. In addition, to study an abridged version makes the future teachers accustomed to use it as a usable material. Abridgment has its efficacy in the literary study, too: reader-response criticism and narrative scholarship. First, the learners' creative engagement to the text encourages them to draw their personal experiences which are made up of the basic storyline. Second, a personal experience linked to the story has a relationship to narrative scholarship proposed in contemporary ecocriticism. Narrative scholarship is a new academic trend that merges the writer's personal experience in physical surroundings with the text which describes the same or similar natural environment. The role of teachers is a key to succeed in the abridged version pedagogy. They can facilitate a web of learner, text, and social context by providing a friendly atmosphere to encourage students' active participation, as well as supplementary materials of the original text.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.111-131
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• 2007

This study explores teacher's corrective feedback types in an error treatment sequence in Korean EFL classroom setting. Corrective feedback moves are coded as explicit correction, recast, or initiations to self-repair. The frequency and distribution of each corrective feedback type are examined. But the special focus was given on feedback types eliciting learner's self-repair (clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, and repetition of error) because initiations to self-repair are believed to facilitate language learning more than other strategies. The results of the study are as follows. First, there was an overwhelming tendency for teacher to use recasts whereas initiations to self-repair were not used as much as recast (52.4% vs. 29.5%). Second, the teacher tended to select feedback types in accordance with error types: namely, recasts after phonological, lexical, and translation errors and initiations to self-repair after grammatical errors though the differences were not significant. Finally, teacher's belief and students' expectation on corrective feedback were compared with actual corrective feedback representations respectively and some mismatches were found. Though both teacher and the students acknowledged the importance and necessity of self-repair, self-repair were not put into practice as such. Therefore, this study suggests more initiations to self-repair be used for effective language learning.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.235-259
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• 2007

The purpose of the present study is to develop a prototype automated scoring system for English writing. The system was developed for scoring writings of Korean middle school students. In order to develop the automated scoring system, following procedures have been applied. First, review and analysis of established automated essay scoring systems in other countries have been accomplished. By doing so, we could get the guidance for development of a new sentence-level automated scoring system for Korean EFL students. Second, knowledge base such as lexicon, grammar and WordNet for natural language processing and error corpus of English writing of Korean middle school students were established. Error corpus was established through the paper and pencil test with 589 third year middle school students. This study provided suggestions for the successful introduction of an automated scoring system in Korea. The automated scoring system developed in this study should be continuously upgraded to improve the accuracy of the scoring system. Also, it is suggested to develop an automated scoring system being able to carry out evaluation of English essay, not only sentence-level evaluation. The system needs to be upgraded for the improved precision, but, it was a successful introduction of an sentence-level automated scoring system for English writing in Korea.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.15-22
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• 2018

Stressed vowels in English are usually produced using longer duration, higher pitch, and greater intensity than unstressed vowels. However, many English as a foreign language (EFL) learners have difficulty producing English lexical stress because their mother tongues do not have such features. In order to investigate if certain non-native English speakers (Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese-Chinese native speakers) are able to produce English lexical stress in a native-like manner, speech samples were extracted from the L2 learners' corpus known as AESOP (the Asian English Speech cOrpus Project). Sixteen disyllabic words were analyzed in terms of the ratio of duration, pitch, and intensity. The results demonstrate that non-native English speakers are able to produce English stress in a similar way to native English speakers, and all speakers (both native and non-native) show a tendency to use duration as the strongest cue in producing stress. The results also show that the duration ratio of native English speakers was significantly higher than that of non-native speakers, indicating that native speakers produce a bigger difference in duration between stressed and unstressed vowels.