• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.69-89
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• 2012

This paper explored the effects of extensive reading (ER) on Korean university students' L2 reading proficiency and reading rates. This study also illustrated how ER can be integrated into a university English reading class. Seventeen students who took a summer reading course participated in this study. Data were gathered through pre- and post- tests in terms of participants' reading comprehension proficiency and reading rates and post- questionnaire with regard to their attitudes toward L2 storybook reading after they have experienced it. The analysis was carried out using the Paired Samples t-test. It was revealed that ER has a positive effect on the enhancement of the participants' reading comprehension and reading rates. The participants showed their continued intention to read in English and a strong belief that persistent reading in English in the long run will help improve their English. The results of this study confirm the educational values of incorporating ER into university English reading classes. The pedagogical implications for EFL instructors are described.

• 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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.27-46
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• 2007

Teachers can maximize students' L2 learning by knowing preferred learning styles. This paper presents the results of a survey that asked 309 English learners to identify their perceptual learning style preferences. It further compared students' favored learning styles in terms of their gender and major field of study and explored a possible link between learning styles and English achievement. Collected data using Reid's (1995) questionnaire were analyzed by descriptive statistics, MANOVA, ANOVA, correlations, multiple regressions including squared partial correlations, and Cronbach's alpha. The results indicated that Korean students favored English learning in group regardless of gender, while their preferred mode of learning was significantly different in regard to their major field of study. Certain learning styles might be profitable for English achievement. Multiple regression analyses revealed that individual mode of learning was the best predictor of students' English achievement. It furthermore showed significant relationships between visual and individual styles of learning and English performance. The findings of the study reflected students' English learning context in which English native-speaking teachers frequently used communicative pair and small group activities for speaking practices that were consonant with students' learning styles.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.spc
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• pp.19-38
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• 2003

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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.39-69
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• 2010

This study aims to identify how participants in online-incorporated English learning perceive interaction between achievement and factors of learning and personality. Using grounded theory analysis, this study attempts to generate a theoretical model depicting how the factors work with the L2 learners situated in the learning setting. A total of 231 college freshmen participated in online and offline EFL learning programs for the duration of one semester. In addition, all respondents completed a survey questionnaire on their learning experiences. In the investigation of the differences between low- and high-proficiency groups, audio-taped interviews with 20 selected students, 10 from each group, have revealed differences not only in the types of personal and instructional factors, but also, more importantly, in the interrelationship between these factors in each group's learning model. These models effectively explained the statistically significant differences in four questionnaire items, such as online learning and contributions of offline class sections to their L2 achievement. These findings entail L2 practitioners' shared understandings of their students' perspectives of learning in the specific L2 learning context.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.19-40
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• 2006

This paper deals with a part-specific analysis of grammatical errors in the production of the English passive in writing. The purpose of the study is dual: to explore common error types in forming the passive; and to provide plausible sources of the errors, with special attention to the role of the native language. To this end, this study obtained a large amount of data from Korean EFL university students using an essay writing task. The results show that in forming the passive sentence, errors were made in various ways and that the most common problem was the formation of the be-auxiliary, in particular, the proper use of tense and S-V agreement. Another important finding was that the global errors found in this study were not necessarily those with the greatest frequency. Also corroborated was the general claim that many factors work together to account for errors. In many cases, interlingual and intralingual factors were shown to interact with each other to explain the passive errors made by Korean students. On the basis of the results, suggestions are made for effective and well-formed use of the passive sentence.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.123-147
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• 2002

As far as the recent ELT research concerned, it seems to have been no hot ‘theoretical’ issues, but ‘practical’ ones in general: e.g., learners and learning, components of proficiency, correlates of L2 learning, etc. This paper focuses on the theme given above, with a special reference to the sub-title: specifically, 1) World English, world Englishes and world's lingua franca; 2) ENL, ESL and EFL; 3) Grammars, style manuals, dictionaries and media; 4) Pronunciation models: RP, BBC model and General American, Network Standard; 5) Lexical, grammatical variations and discourse grammars; 6) Beliefs and subjective theories in foreign language research; 7) Dilemma among radical, canonical and eclectic views. In conclusion, the author offers a modest proposal: we need to appeal to our own experience, intention, feeling and purpose, that is, our identity to express “our own selves” in our contexts toward the world anywhere, if not sounding authentic enough, but producing it plausibly well. It is time for us (with our ethno-cultural autonomy) to need to be complementary to and parallel with its native speakers' linguistic-cultural authenticity in terms of the broadest mutual understanding.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.241-259
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• 2002

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the recent trends of the development of the English textbooks in EFL situation. The 7th National English Curriculum(NEC) in 2001 which emphasized the curriculum-centered school education have had much influence on the traditional textbook-centered school education in Korea. According to the paradigmatic change of school education, the contents of the English textbooks were changed into the new types of students-centered classroom activities. For students' communicative activities, the English textbooks were developed by two types of syllabuses: process-oriented syllabus and product-oriented syllabus. The 7th NEC includes procedural syllabus and task-based syllabus as well as grammatical- structural syllabus and notional-functional syllabus. In short, unlike the English textbooks in former curriculums, learners' classroom activities and tasks have been emphasized in those to foster their communicative competence.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.209-224
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• 2009

This study examined the role of contextual knowledge in cross-cultural communication between non-native speakers on 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. The study investigated the influence of students' relative contextual knowledge on active participation in interactions and discussed the results focusing on the use of discourse strategies for meaning negotiation. The study argues that in interactions even between non-native speakers with limited proficiency, contextual knowledge in the topic under discussion affects the degree to which they accommodate to each other during communication and suggests that the focus of teaching English as a foreign language also should be given to what kind of contextual knowledge students need to obtain and how to express it rather than what level of proficiency in English they need to acquire.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.911-938
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• 2011

The present study examined the effect of two variables of task complexity, reasoning demand and time pressure, each from the resourcedirecting and resource-dispersing dimension in Robinson's (2001) framework of task classification. Reasoning demand was operationalized as the two types of texts to read and summarize, expository and argumentative. Time pressure was operationalized as the two modes of performance, oral and written. Six university students summarized the two types of text orally and twenty four students from the same school summarized them in the written form. Results from t test and ANCOVA showed that in the oral mode, reasoning demand tends to heighten the complexity of the language used in the summary in competition with accuracy but such an effect disappeared in the written mode. It was interpreted that the degree of time pressure is not the only difference between the oral and written modes but that the two modes may be fundamentally different cognitive tasks, and that Robinson's (2001) and Skehan's (1998) models were differentially supported by the oral mode of tasks but not by the written mode of the tasks.