• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.225-243
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• 2009

This study investigates the use of different speech act of apology strategies between male and female EFL college students by comparing the components of intensity, stylistic competence, and semantic formulas. The data was collected from 37 participants who were studying freshmen English reading course at the Department of English Education of C University in Seoul. Most students were English majors taking pre-teacher course of teaching English for secondary school students. The participants were divided into two gender groups of male and female. The discourse completion test (DCT) which was revised from the speech act of apology by Olshtain and Cohen (1990) was provided with the participants after the researcher explained the speech act of apology in ten situations. The speech act of apology depends on situation variables: social solidarity, severity of offense, and social status. The results show that in the preference of intensity, male and female have almost the similar ratio in high (female: 24.7%, male 24%) and low intensity (female: 75.3%, male: 76%). In the use of stylistic competence, male group (21%) expresses more diversely formal features than female group (12%), while female (87%) use more informal features than male (66%). Most of participants show a limitation in the use of speaking four types of semantic formulas: expression of apology (APOL), acknowledgment of responsibility (RESP), offer of repair (REPR), and promise of forbearance (FORB). As nonnative speakers, the participants cannot conduct the semantic formula in some situations regardless of the tasks provided. The results suggest that English teachers should recognize pragmatic variations in which students feel difficulty in appropriate speaking strategies on apology. This study also contributes to teaching learners the strategies and speaking patterns in the course of various apology situations.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.225-231
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• 2020

This study aims to examine the efficacy of online lectures conducted by most universities in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Furthermore, this study analyzes students' opinions regarding online lectures, thereby assessing the possible direction that future online lectures could take. This study's results indicate that online lectures can have a positive effect on learners' reading comprehension. Also, student satisfaction with online lectures was found to be quite high. Among the reasons students cited for favoring the online format were: (1) the fun presentation of class information; (2) the diversity of subjects covered; and (3) the ease of using the Internet. Among the improvements made for enhancing online lectures were technical enhancements (such as fixing attendance check authentication errors) and stabilizing the playback of lecture videos. By way of concluding, this study claims that professors who are familiar with giving lectures in person should come to recognize that online lectures are not simply another option, but are essential for the future. As such, the academic community must focus on developing online content as a way to further higher education's development in meeting the academic demands of both the present and the future.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.10
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• pp.603-612
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• 2021

The purpose of this study is to allow beginner level English learners to experience the English speaking task using pictures, and to analyze the meanings of the experience using a phenomenological research method. As research participants, 10 freshmen majoring in Power Generation Facilities at Korean Polytechnic University in Gangwon-do were selected. Face-to-face interviews and SNS were used for data collection, and Colaizzi's research method was adopted for data analysis. As a result of the analysis, 9 themes, 4 theme clusters, and 2 categories were derived. The results are as follows. First, the participants were able to find hope that they could speak English at their own level through the English speaking task using pictures. Second, they stated that the effect of the visual medium of painting increased concentration and curiosity and lowered anxiety. Third, it was recognized that self-confidence, a speaker like a native speaker, and quickness of speaking improved due to familiarity with speaking English. Fourth, the biggest difficulty in the English speaking task was vocabulary. So, they felt the limitation in explaining the picture, and they were having a lot of trouble in translating Korean words into English words. Finally, through the results of this study, the effect of the medium of picture was confirmed, and necessary future studies were suggested.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.460-466
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• 2010

It is well-known that Korean EFL learners have difficulties in producing English fricatives which are not in the inventory of Korean and consequently tend to replace English fricatives with stops. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Korean students also have difficulties perceiving English anterior coronal consonants including fricatives. To this end, forty Korean college students participated in an identification test which consisted of 24 nonce words with English anterior coronal consonants in 4 different prosodic locations (CV, VC, VCVV,VVCV). It was shown that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV, providing confusion matrices for each target consonant. It was also found that Korean participants had a great difficulty identifying English[$\theta$] and [$\eth$], which are novel in Korean. Importantly, the confusion patterns found in the perception test tended not to be identical with those found in the previous production studies in that both stops and fricatives were misperceived as fricatives while fricatives were misproduced as stops. Further, perceptual devoicing and intervocalic voicing were attested inVC and intervocalic position, respectively. Based on the findings of this study, pedagogical implications were drawn.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.6475-6482
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• 2015

The purpose of the study was two folded: to examine whether form-focused instruction (FFI) with corrective feedback (CF) is effective for the acquisition of the target linguistic forms and to find out the extent to which of the students' perceptions as well as their attitudes towards English instruction that they received. Tests and questionnaires were implemented to 122 Korean EFL students from eight classes enrolled in an English communication course. They were randomly assigned to three groups: the input-based group, who received typographical input enhancement materials, so-called the TIE group, the output-based group, who performed dictogloss tasks, so-called the DICT group, and the control group (CG). The data analysis was made on both tests and questionnaires by using SPSS 21.0 for Windows. The study found that different types of FFI with CF contributed to the improvement of students' grammatical knowledge and both the TIE and DICT task group students positively changed their perceptions and understanding as well as their attitudes towards the English instruction given, and students in all groups preferred pair work activities. In addition, most of the TIE and DICT students showed their interest and satisfaction with English class, whereas the CG group students did not. Based on the findings, this study suggested that well-planned and properly-chosen FFI in the form of pair work activities should be applied in classrooms with consideration of students' instructional preference in Korean EFL contextual settings.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.797-802
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• 2023

In an environment where English is a foreign language, English learners can use AI voice chatbots in English-speaking practice activities to enhance their speaking motivation, provide opportunities for communication practice, and improve their English speaking ability. In this study, we propose a teaching-style AI voice chatbot that can be easily utilized by lower elementary school students and enhance their learning. To apply the Teachable Agent system to language learning, which is an activity based on tense, context, and memory, we proposed a new method of TA by applying the Teachable Agent to reflect the learner's English pronunciation and level and generate the agent's answers according to the learner's errors and implemented a Teachable Agent AI chatbot prototype. We conducted usability evaluations with actual elementary English teachers and elementary school students to demonstrate learning effects. The results of this study can be applied to motivate students who are not interested in learning or elementary school students to voluntarily participate in learning through role-switching.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.289-295
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• 2020

The purpose of this study is to investigate the difference of learners' preference for animation movies in EFL English classes. In this study, four classes of 124 college students that participated in the English screen class employed an animation, Alice in Wonderland. This study examined the different activities of three categories of pre-study, while-study, and post-study. First, on the analysis of studying activities of 15 items, the results showed meaningful differences depending on the students' gender. That is, female students were more interested in mostly all of the activities, while male students' interests were skewed to some post-study activities. Second, comparing the differences of studying interest among the three groups, the low group is more concerned with the pre-study activities, while the higher group is generally interested in the while studying and post-study activities. Third, on the analysis of correlation between the three level groups and activities, the results indicated meaningful differences in some activities. In summary, based on the results of this research, it is necessary to consider the learners' variables and focus on the learners in the English screen class. Further, teachers should apply these results to the management of their screen class and to the development of teaching materials.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.1
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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.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.15-24
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the use of video resources on improving listening comprehension. 86 students enrolled in a summer session at a Korean university participated in the study. They were assigned to one of three groups based on the results of their TOEIC test scores: 29 students were assigned to the low group, 29 students to the intermediate group, and 28 students to the advanced group. Each group studied the same lessons using authentic video materials. They were taught for 10 sessions over three weeks. The pre- and post-test design helped to determine whether authentic videos were effective in improving listening skills for all proficiency levels. In addition, a questionnaire investigated students' perceptions toward using video resources. Paired sample t-tests, ANOVAs, and an ANCOVA were utilized to identify significant differences. It was concluded that in the intermediate and advanced proficiency groups, the students' listening skills increased significantly after learning with videos. In addition, listening improvements among the intermediate and advanced students were much greater than those of the low proficiency group. As for students' perceptions toward using video resources for improving their English listening skills, they responded positively. Based on these findings, pedagogical implications are suggested, and future studies will be discussed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.89-112
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• 2005

This study investigated the effects of collocation-based vocabulary instruction for the experimental group (G2). It was compared to the traditional wordlist-based vocabulary instruction for the control group (G1). This results reflect the development of low level high school EFL learners' vocabulary learning strategy use and the positive change in the affective domain. In the analysis of the survey responses, G1 and G2 did not differ significantly on the first questionnaire. They did, however, differ significantly on the second questionnaire. G2 used more strategies to discover and to consolidate the meaning of the words by means of combining words. In terms of the affective domain, G2 participated more actively in the learning activities, which had a significant effect on vocabulary growth, memory, self-confidence, motivation, and cooperative learning. This is attributable to the fact that G2 was more inquisitive, interested, challenged, participatory, cooperative, and attentive than G1 in performing the vocabulary task activities. Moreover, the data collected from the questionnaire showed that G2 performed more interactive and dynamic activities in solving the given tasks.