• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.97-121
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• 2011

This study aims to examine how motivational constructs are interrelated with social, context-specific factors and, as a result, contribute to L2 writing achievement within the framework of self-determination theory. The data consisted of 67 Korean college students' questionnaire responses, final scores in an on-offline blended writing course, and qualitative interviews with 5 students. In the descriptive and the correlation analyses, the participants' extrinsic motivation was found higher than intrinsic motivation, with low amotivation. Among social factors, immersion environment, foreign instructor, and peer comparison marked high scores, whereas Korean instructor and online material gained low scores. Those contextual factors were interrelated with each other, such that the immersion factor correlated significantly with Korean instructor and peer comparison. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivational subscales engendered strong correlations with the high-scored social factors, i.e., immersion, foreign instructor, and peer comparison, which were also closely interrelated with L2 writing achievement. The findings illuminate intricate workings of motivation in its effects on L2 achievement and corroborate the roles of contextual factors. The effect of motivational subscales on achievement may be valid through interplay with some social factors. The dynamics of motivation is discussed for pedagogical applications.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.57-71
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility of the use of reading aloud as a way of teaching English reading in a formal college-level English reading classroom. The study tried to examine the effects of reading aloud on the development of English reading ability in terms of comprehension and speed and the students' perceptions of the use of reading aloud in an English reading classroom. The participants of the study were 36 third year students at a college. The results of the cloze test and reading speed test showed that reading aloud had a positive effect on the improvement of English reading ability. The students received higher scores in the cloze test after the course and read a text faster than before the course. The analysis of the course evaluation questionnaire indicated that the students in the study showed positive attitudes toward the use of reading aloud in an English reading classroom. Most of the students reported that reading aloud was an effective way of improving their English reading comprehension and speed. However, the students were not fully satisfied with the reading materials used in the study. The results of the present study indicated that reading aloud may be incorporated into a formal English reading classroom effectively.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.309-326
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• 2011

This study examines the relationship between second language use outside of class and oral proficiency development. It first identifies out-of-class activities of international graduate students in the U.S. and the average time spent speaking English in those out-of-class activities. Interviews and student self-measurements of time spent speaking English each day were used to investigate the types and quantities of out-of-class activities. In addition, two sets of student oral proficiency test scores were collected. Correlation analysis is used to find out the relationship of the variables between the most salient out-of-class activities and oral proficiency gains. The findings indicate that second language use outside of class is important for international graduate students to improve their oral proficiency. This is especially true with regularized interaction such as talking at work and the average time spent speaking in English a day outside of class. This study suggests that learners of English in an ESL environment should be encouraged to take part in out-of-class activities in addition to English use in the classroom in order for them to improve their oral proficiency.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.39-56
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• 2005

This study is a small-scale replication study of Kubota (1998). Kubota discovered that L1 rhetoric was not the main cause of L2 writing problems. The conclusion of Kubota's study was in contrast to that of contrastive rhetoric research that claimed that the use of L1 rhetorical styles in L2 writing negatively affects the quality of L2 writing, in particular, at the organizational level. According to Kubota(1998), the use of Japanese rhetorical styles did not deteriorate the quality of English writing. By investigating Korean ESL learners, this replication study examined whether L1 and L2 writings have the same rhetorical styles and how L1 rhetorical styles affect the L2 writing quality. The study analyzed Korean and English persuasive writings written by 12 Korean ESL learners in terms of organization. The results show that Korean learners of English used different rhetorical styles in their L1 Korean writing and L2 English writing. However, there was a positive relationship between L1 Korean and L2 English organization scores.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.109-119
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• 2013

The purpose of this paper is to show the tendency of evaluators in the pronunciation evaluation of English utterances. The tendency was visualized using the evaluation model of English pronunciation proposed in [1]. One hundred fifty female university students and four evaluators participated in the study. Students read eight English sentences aloud as evaluators evaluated English pronunciation by their own criteria. The models based on their pronunciation evaluation proved to be efficient in showing their evaluation tendency in terms of the fundamental frequency, intensity, segmental durations, and segmental spectra as compared to those of the five native speakers of English chosen for building the models. However, human evaluators were not always consistent in their evaluation and sometimes gave conflicting scores to the same students.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.147-166
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• 2006

This study investigates the effect of misplacement in a written Computer-delivered ESL Placement Test (CEPT) context. The study aims to address the following two research questions: a) which scoring rubric features cause the misplacement of ESL learner's writing scores? and b) which scoring rubric features improve ESL learner's writing scores? Thirty-four international examinees took the test and participated in surveys at the University of Illinois. Twelve examinees of them attended the CEPT workshop test. In the workshop test, they carried out self-evaluation on their first essays using a scoring rubric and compared with expert raters' results. After the workshop, the examinees responded to a survey and interview. For the first research question, the results of the survey and interview addressed that the majority disagreed with the raters' rating results. The self-evaluation results also indicated that their misunderstanding of organization feature caused the misplacement. For the second question, the CEPT workshop scores were improved due to the score improvement in the organization feature while the contribution of other features to the total scores was little. Most of the examinees pointed out that a lesson on the scoring rubric enhanced their understanding of the writing features of the rubric so that their placement scores were generally improved.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.611-635
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• 2003

The main purpose of this study is to find out what teaching method is more effective than others through experiments for college students. Therefore, this study aims to review various effective methods of vocabulary teaching. According to the results of the experiments, the methods of teaching vocabulary through the process of word formation and meaningful words led to the high scores at the posttest regardless of the scores gained by the individual subjects at the pretest. However, the method of teaching vocabulary through context showed that the improved scores at the posttest generally reflected the individual differences of the scores at the pretest. That is, in the latter, it is recognizable that the subjects who achieved the high scores at the pretest did very well at the posttest as well. In conclusion, judging from the mean rate of improvement, the method of teaching vocabulary through word formation seems to be more effective than that of teaching vocabulary through meaningful words and context.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.961-972
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to investigate the improvement of English proficiency of children in the ESL and EFL learning style classrooms through the experiment method. The results of this research are as follows: first, the scores of listening and speaking and the perception of alphabets in the ESL program are higher than that in the EFL program. This means that learning in the ESL style classroom is the better way to improve English skills than in the EFL style classroom, which is common in Korea. Second, there is no difference in the English listening and speaking skills and the perception of the English alphabets between the two gender groups in the ESL & EFL style classrooms. These results suggest that the target language may be used in the English classrooms by the teachers and the students with the materials, books, and equipment are English. Teachers are expected to be in charge of playing decisive roles as demonstrators of speech, models and correctors of pronunciation and providers of materials including TV, VCR, CD players, and cassette recorders, etc.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.291-315
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• 2010

The present study examined the role of dialogue journaling in Korean students' English writing development. Thirteen Korean middle school students participated in a five-week dialogue journal writing program. The participants' English writing skills before and after their dialogue journaling were compared in terms of holistic and analytical scores of their English essays. The study also examined the changes in the participants' language use, as manifested in their dialogue journals. The results indicated the positive influence of dialogue journal writing on the participants' English writing skills in the areas of content and lexical fluency. As for the linguistic evidence that related dialogue journaling to English writing development, the three patterns of change in language use emerged from the participants' dialogue journals: a) raised awareness on grammar conventions, b) raised awareness on discourse conventions, and c) increased depth and richness in idea development. There were also three unhelpful factors associated with little improvement of English writing: a) lack in basic writing skills, b) repetitive use of identical sentence patterns, and c) lack in grammatical and lexical awareness. Overall, the results suggested that dialogue journaling could facilitate Korean students' English writing development when it creates authentic communicative interactions between the teacher and students.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.281-284
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• 2017

On the basis of studies that show multi-word combinations, that is the field of phraseology, this study aims to examine relationship between the quality of text and phraseological competence in L2 English writing, following Yves Bestegen et al. (2014). Using two different association scores, t-score and Mutual Information(MI), which are opposite ways of measuring phraseological competence, in terms of scoring frequency and infrequency, bigrams from L2 writers' text scored based on a reference corpus, GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web based English). On a cross-sectional approach, we propose that the quality of the essays and the mean MI score of the bigram extracted from YELC, Yonsei English Learner Corpus, correlated to each other. The negative scores of bigrams are also correlated with the quality of the essays in the way that these bigrams are absent from the reference corpus, that is mostly ungrammatical. It indicates that increase in the proportion of the negative scored bigrams debases the quality of essays. The conclusion shows the quality of the essays scored by MI and t-score on cross-sectional approach, and application to teaching method and assessment for second language writing proficiency.