• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.1
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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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.185-210
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• 2006

This study has two purposes. First, it aims to suggest an appropriate approach to English writing education for Korean high school students in a cooperative learning situation. It also aims to suggest what type of learner grouping, either homogeneous or heterogeneous, is appropriate by comparing the learners' writing abilities and the changes of their affective factors after being exposed to cooperative EFL writing instruction. Two homogeneous classes were selected and instructed to write in English for 11 weeks. One was composed of homogeneous small groups based on the students' writing scores, and the other was composed of heterogeneous small groups, again based on the students' writing scores. The results showed that the improvement between the two class types was quite different across different proficiency levels. For example, although there is little difference between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous classes of low and intermediate-level learners in writing ability improvement, high-level students showed a significant difference between the classes. In addition, it was found that class participation correlated significantly to writing ability improvement. Cooperative learning was proved to be an effective writing instructional approach to encourage learners' interest and increase their self-confidence; however, the results did not show any significant differences in learners' affective domain between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous classes. Similarly, the learners' grouping preference was not affected by the grouping method.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.1-8
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• 2023

This study investigates why Korean English speakers misunderstand the English article system, which article Korean EFL learners use more accurately in their English writings, and implications for English writing instruction from Korean EFL learners' utterances. There have been numerous studies on the acquisition of English article system by non-native English speakers. Those studies agree that acquiring English articles is difficult for learners of English as a second language. As a result, in this study, many English learners use the definite and indefinite articles a/an. Many wrote articles from their writings, and occasionally, errors of excessive use of definite articles occurred. Through this, this paper investigates how a Korean English learner whose native language has no articles chooses the English article system in speech. It is based on the elicited production of the Korean English learner and suggests some implications for teaching English writing in the classroom. When English instructors teach Korean English learners to write English, it is more important than anything else to practice the correct usage of definite articles or indefinite articles.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.71-76
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• 2022

The purpose of this research is to investigate the types of semantic errors made by MT in translating EFL college students' original drafts written in Korean into English. Specifically, this study attempts to find out 1) what types of semantic errors are most frequently committed by MT? and 2) how students feel about the quality of the MT-produced output? The findings from this study indicated that MT produced the errors related to accuracy (47%) the most, followed by the errors related to fluency and ambiguity (14.6% respectively). Students were well aware of the errors with accuracy and fluency but had limited ability to check the errors with ambiguity. Based on the findings, this study suggests pedagogical implications which can be implemented in L2 writing classrooms.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.91-106
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• 2010

This study examines the use of hedges in cross-cultural communication between EFL learners in an e-learning environment. The study analyzes the use of hedges in a corpus of an interactive web with a bulletin board system through which college students of English at Japanese and Korean universities interacted with each other discussing the topics of local and global issues. It compares the use of hedges in the students' corpus to that of a native English speakers' corpus. The result shows that EFL learners tend to use relatively smaller number of hedges than the native speakers in terms of the frequencies of the total tokens. It further reveals that the learners' overuse of a single versatile high-frequency hedging item, I think, results in relative underuse of other hedging devices. This indicates that due to their small repertoire of hedges, EFL learners' overuse of a limited number of hedging items may cause their speech or writing to become less competent. Based on the result and interviews with the learners, the study also argues that hedging should be understood in its social contexts and should not be understood just as a lack of conviction or a mark of low proficiency. Suggestions were made for using computer corpora in understanding EFL learners' language difficulties and helping them develop communicative and pragmatic competence.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.1
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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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.171-188
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of ongoing feedback from the professor in students' processes of learning and developing writing skills. Specifically, the researcher was concerned with how ongoing feedback affected students' attitudes towards writing because in EFL contexts, motivating students to write is a first step to engage them in a challenging journey of academic writing. 20 freshmen taking a writing course, "Paragraph & Essay Writing", at A university participated in this study and they were asked to complete the questionnaire at the end of the spring semester 2009. The results revealed that receiving ongoing feedback from the professor had a positive influence on affective domain, was helpful to develop learning strategies, and was valuable in learning outcomes. However, they also expressed negative opinions: feeling a burden, focusing on forms, and feeling confused. To reflect their opinions, the following four suggestions were made to create a more effective learning environment: promoting learner autonomy, facilitating individual writing conferences, giving balanced feedback in between form and content, and using judicious feedback through careful streaming.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.127-152
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• 2006

For the past 20 years the process approach to writing has been popular in second language writing classrooms. However, there have been very few studies conducted in Korea with regard to the composing processes and the effects of proficiency on writers' usage. The present study attempts to begin to fill this gap. Three groups of college students with different writing proficiency participated in the study: the advanced group, the intermediate group, and the beginning group. The verbal protocol of their writing processes revealed that they approached writing tasks differently. While the advanced writers focused on generating texts and ideas and examined their writing at both global and local levels, the other two groups of students tended to focus on evaluating text at the local level and generated fewer ideas and less text. The findings from this study are then compared to those of some major studies of the composing process as conclusions are subsequently drawn about the specific needs of Korean college writers.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.227-251
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• 2007

The development and use of computer mediated communications (CMC) as a tool for teaching and learning English has grown considerably in recent years. The purpose of this study is to investigate factors related to learners' participation, achievement, and satisfaction in EFL classes using web-based bulletin boards. The total number of 77 university students participated in this study. Three domains and eight independent variables investigated in this study were a learner-related domain (attitudes toward CMC, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, attitudes toward writing), an interaction-related domain (student-student interaction, teacher-student interaction), and an environmental domain (physical support and design of the web site). In order to determine interrelation of variables correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were used. The results of this study showed that the factors predicting a learner's participation were instrumental motivation, attitudes toward writing, and teacher-student interaction. The factors explaining a learner's achievement were learner's participation and attitudes toward writing, and the factors predicting a learner's satisfaction were integrative motivation, student-student interaction, teacher-student interaction, physical support and learner's participation.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2014.06a
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• pp.39-40
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• 2014