• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.537-543
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• 2016

This paper suggests a class model to improve the English oral proficiency for intermediate low English speaking learners. Utilizing the four English skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking), the class model focuses on the learners' schema and discussion strategies. To enhance the learners' motivation and match their cognitive capacity, 10 discussion topics were prepared by surveying the learners. A pilot experiment was conducted to investigate the teaching effects of the discussion class model with 26 college students majoring in English in Seoul. The participants' oral proficiency was measured both before, and after the instructions by OPIc (Oral Proficiency Interview in computer). As a result of the experiment, the percentage of participants whose oral proficiency levels were lower than intermediate mid decreased from 82% to 47%. In addition, the percentage of participants with higher oral proficiency than intermediate low was increased dramatically from 18% to 53%, which supports the claim that through discussion, the class learners' diverse and creative ideas need to be expressed in a formal and intelligible language. Finally, through the findings of the study, the possibility of a discussion class can be expected, regardless of the learners' low level of oral proficiency.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.169-184
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to identify the most important factor(s) that contribute(s) to the overall oral proficiency and to examine whether the factor(s) play(s) a different role depending on the proficiency level of learners. Learners were divided into novice group and advanced group and were asked to produce an oral recording of a story based on a comic strip. The recordings were transcribed and graded by three raters. According to the results, the raters attained high inter-rater reliability when assessing advanced learners. However, the reliability level became considerably lower in the assessment of novice learners. The best predictor of oral proficiency among novice learners was sociolinguistic competence and fluency, while grammatical competence and fluency were the strongest predictors for advanced learners. The results suggest the need for a separate assessment tool for different proficiency levels and the need for a different focus in the classroom depending on the learners' proficiency level.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.439-444
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• 2021

This study investigates the relationship between syntactic complexity and English proficiency for Korean college students, using the recently developed TAASSC(the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity) program. Essays on the ICNALE(International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus were employed and phrasal complexity indices and clausal complexity indices, respectively were used to predict English proficiency level for Korean students. Results of stepwise regression analysis showed that indices of phrasal complexity explained 8% of variance in English proficiency, while indices of clausal complexity accounted for approximately 11%. That is, indices of clausal complexity were slightly better predictors of English proficiency than indices of phrasal complexity, which contradicts Biber et at.(2011)'s claim that phrasal complexity is the hallmark of writing development.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.101-124
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• 2011

This paper investigated the relationships among Korean EFL learners' listening anxiety, listening strategy use, and listening proficiency. One hundred and forty four Korean college students who were enrolled in the required practical English classes participated in this study. Questionnaires related to students' listening strategy use and listening anxiety were administered and a TOEIC listening comprehension test was given to measure the students' listening proficiency. The one-way ANOVA was used to analyze the data. The findings of this study are that the students' listening performance is positively correlated with their strategy use and negatively correlated with their anxiety level, and their strategy use is negatively correlated with their anxiety level. The results suggest that successful learning will occur when anxiety is reduced and when the use of strategies is encouraged more often. The pedagogical implications for EFL educators and teachers are described.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.53-75
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• 2012

The present study examined the role of language proficiency in dyadic discourse in the organization of repairs and the distribution of linguistic features contained in repairs. One native speaker of English and five non-native speakers participated and formed three dyads: one same-proficiency NNS-NNS (non-native speaker), one different-proficiency NNS-NNS, and one NS (native speaker)-NNS dyads. Results showed that overall repair patterns in this type of interaction were more conversational than didactic, and that the degree of difference in proficiency between the participants in the dyad influenced repair patterns and the distribution of linguistic features in relation to repair patterns. Also, discussed in the present paper are some implications of the results and other issues related to language learning.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.35-70
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• 2003

This study investigates the acquisition of English prepositions of location and direction by Malaysian Chinese ESL learners. It was conducted with the objective of finding out which of the two types of prepositions was more problematic to the L1 Chinese learners. The study also sought to investigate the effect of age and proficiency levels in English on the acquisition of the English prepositions of location and direction by these learners. Additionally, the study sets out to determine the extent to which the L1 Chinese learners have acquired the English prepositions of location and direction. This study involved three groups of Chinese ESL learners: elementary, intermediate and advanced. They were selected based on their age and their performance on a standardized proficiency test. The instrument used to collect data was a preposition test comprising 85 items. These items on prepositions of location and direction were randomly arranged in the tasks. The test required subjects to respond to multiple choice questions, match given sentences with appropriate prepositions, fill in blanks with the appropriate prepositions, judge given sentences to see if they are grammatical or ungrammatical and correct the ungrammatical sentence by providing the appropriate prepositions. The results indicate that age and proficiency levels of the learners made a difference in the acquisition of English prepositions of location and direction. The older learners with higher proficiency levels seem to fare better than the younger and less proficient learners. The results suggest that the prepositions of location arc slightly more problematic than prepositions of directions to the L1 Chinese learners. Our data also suggest that certain prepositions of each type are more problematic than others.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.37-54
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• 2009

This study investigated vocabulary learning strategies used by EFL middle school learners in Korea and examined the relationship between the middle school learners' vocabulary learning strategy (VLS) use and their vocabulary proficiency level. One hundred and forty-one students in a public middle school participated in the study and the data for this study were collected from a vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire and a vocabulary proficiency test. Based on the result of the vocabulary proficiency test, the participants were divided into three proficiency groups: high-, mid- and low- level proficiency groups. The overall findings of the study revealed that the participants used cognitive strategies most frequently and social strategies least frequently. The most frequently used individual strategies were 'using a bilingual dictionary,' 'studying the sound of a word' and 'practicing words through verbal repetition.' The least frequently used ones were 'interacting with native speakers' and 'studying or practicing the meaning of a word in a group.' The research results also showed that the vocabulary proficiency level has a significant influence on the vocabulary strategy use. The more proficient learners used vocabulary learning strategies more actively. More specifically, the high proficiency level group used metacognitive strategies the most. The middle and low proficiency groups used cognitive strategies the most. It is suggested that language teachers should facilitate the vocabulary learning process by helping learners develop appropriate strategies.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.93-114
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• 2011

The aim of this study is twofold. First, this study aimed to explore how Korean university students' English learning motivation is related to their English listening proficiency and study time. Second, it attempted to interpret the English learning motivation linking the two different motivation theories: self-determination theory and L2 motivational self system. The constructs of the students' L2 learning motivation were investigated with the data obtained through the questionnaire from 122 sophomore students. A factor analysis was conducted to extract the major factors of motivation. As a result, 6 factors were extracted: Intrinsic Pleasure, Identified Value Regulation, Intrinsic Accomplishment, Introjected Regulation, External Regulation, and Identified Regulation. The Interrelatedness among the assessment results on the L2 listening proficiency (pre and post test), listening study time, and motivation factors was measured by correlation coefficients. The statistical results indicated that pre-test scores were significantly related to Identified Regulation and Identified Value Regulation toward English learning, and post-test results had significant correlation with Intrinsic Accomplishment and Identified Regulation. However, no motivation subtypes showed statistical association with the students' listening study time. The results were attempted to be interpreted both under L2 motivational self system and self-determination framework to better illuminate the motivation theory with more explanatory power.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1017-1041
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• 2011

This study investigates Korean EFL learners' awareness and use of the English existential there-construction by examining data collected from 54 Korean EFL learners of English by means of a pragmalinguistic judgment task and a controlled discourse completion task. The results of the judgment task reveal that lower proficiency learners rated canonical sentences and existentials with a preposed locative best in the communicative situations where the use of existentials would have been most appropriate. A comparison of the ratings by more proficient learners and native speakers shows that existentials received highest ratings by both groups where they are the most natural option, while canonical sentences received significantly higher ratings by the learners. With regard to the production data, learners tended to avoid existentials, but rather relied on canonical sentences. Existentials were rarely used by lower proficiency learners and not used productively even by more proficient learners in the situations where existentials would have been the most natural option. These results suggest that Korean learners' difficulty with the use of existentials is not merely a product of performance limitations, but attributable to limited knowledge about existentials and their syntactic alternatives in terms of contextual appropriateness. Lower proficiency learners lack such knowledge, and more proficient learners, while showing better awareness of the use of existentials, have problems as to the placement of new information when engaging in writing tasks that place lower level of demands on attention to the information status of noun phrases compared to communicative, oral tasks.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.161-175
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• 2011

This paper examines Korean EFL high school students' reader responses on an expository text and a narrative text with the same topic. The purpose of the study is to investigate whether they have different reading models depending on the two genres and whether there are any differences depending on the learners' proficiency levels. The analysis focuses on textual, critical, and aesthetic reading models in the reader responses written in English by science-gifted high school students (N=30). The results show that the participants have different reading models in reading an expository text and a narrative text. They tend to read the expository text in a more critical way while reading the narrative text in a more personal and emotional way. Moreover, regardless of the proficiency levels, they wrote longer responses on the narrative text than the expository text. However, the proficiency level of English does not support any significant differences in the types of reading models. The findings provide Korean EFL high school students' characteristics in L2 reading and suggest the pedagogical implication to pursue linguistic development as well as reading for pleasure.