• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.165-190
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• 2011

This research investigates listening strategies and the relationship between the employment of strategy and listening proficiency of Korean EFL middle school students. One hundred and four middle school students (N = 104) participated in this study and their strategy use was assessed through a questionnaire adapted from Oxford's (1990) SILL and O'Malley and Chamot (1990). To measure listening proficiency, the English Listening Ability Test designed by 15 city and provincial offices of education in Korea was used. The results show that students employed a moderate use of strategies; compensation strategies were used most frequently and metacognitive strategies were used the least frequently. Significant differences were found in the use of implicit strategy among different listening proficiency groups, but not in their use of behavioral strategy. Furthermore, there were significant differences in the use of implicit memory, cognitive and compensation strategies among groups of students with different listening proficiencies, but not in their use of metacognitive strategy. The results from multiple regression analysis indicate that implicit strategy use could play an important role in listening comprehension. The findings suggest the need for additional research to explore the effect of listening strategy training for English language learners.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.117-138
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to increase students' interest in the subject of English, which has been led by some mannerism, and to improve the students' basic scholastic ability and self-controlled problem solving, through adopting an individualized Web Based Instruction(WBI) as a concrete and practical learning method. In order to achieve this, an individualized Web Based Instruction(WBI) homepage has been developed to be applied experimentally to the field of middle school education for 8 months, and a research has been made on its effects on the students' interest in English along with the improvement of English. Two groups which showed almost the same interest were selected as a controlled group and an experimental one. Individualized Web Based Instruction was applied to the experimental group, while the controlled group was not instructed according to student ability. The controlled group was taught using CD added with the textbook. As a result of T-test, the students in the experimental group showed more improvement in communicative competence than those in the controlled group.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.51-58
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• 2010

This study investigates the perception and production of English front vowels focusing on the distinction in /i/ vs /I/ and /$\varepsilon$/ vs /$\ae$/ by sixty-one Korean speakers. The first portion of this study focused on the perceptional discrimination by the subjects of two sets of English vowel contrasts, /i/ vs /I/ and /$\varepsilon$/ vs /$\ae$/. In the second portion of the study, the production of these vowels by the same subjects who had participated in the perceptional discrimination test was examined acoustically and subsequently compared with that of the control group comprised of native English speakers. The major results indicate that: (1) In perception tests, Korean subjects can discriminate between /i/ and /I/ relatively well, while many of them were not able to discriminate between /$\varepsilon$/ and /$\ae$/; (2) the Korean subjects, however, have difficulty producing a distinct version of these front vowels; and, (3) The relationship between the perception and production is not significant. These results were analyzed with the concept of "under-differentiation" and "reinterpretation of distinction," as well as how phonetic differences influenced the production and discrimination of front vowels by Korean speakers.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.43-50
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• 2006

The aim of this study was to identify pronunciation difficulties of Korean learners of English in their articulation of English sibilants /dg, g, z/. Forty-five syllables were produced five times by twelve college students. Test scores were measured from the score board made by FluSpeak, a speech training software program, which was designed for English pronunciation practice and improvement. Results show that 1) the subjects had lower scores in producing /g/ than /dg/ and /z/ from all positions, and 2) subjects had lower scores in inter-vocalic position than in pre-vocalic position and in post-vocalic position when they produced /dg/, /g/, and /z/. The results suggest that on the whole Korean learners have much difficulty in producing /g/, and they also have more auditory and articulatory problems in intervocalic than in the other positions when they produce these sibilants.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.39-44
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to investigate the English pronunciation for high-leveled adult Korean speakers based on pronunciation proficiency test. For this purpose, one native English speaker and eight Korean speakers' suprasegmental features such as sentence F0, standard deviation of vowels and stressed / unstressed vowels' F0, duration and intensity were measured and analyzed. The major results show that (1) high-leveled adult Korean speakers' sentence F0 was similar to that of native English speaker, (2) vowel durations, were less diverse than those of native English speakers, and (3) high-leveled adult Korean speakers utilize vowel duration more actively than F0 to indicate the stress assignment of vowels.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.187-209
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• 2001

This study attempts to supplement what is known about the influence of prior knowledge on second language listening comprehension. To do so, the study examines the effect of prior knowledge and language proficiency on the ability of L2 listeners to understand texts. The purpose of an experiment was to determine the effect of topic familiarity on the L2 listening comprehension ability of subjects who varied in L2 listening proficiency level. The subjects (N=117) were selected from a population of college students enrolled in the Departments of English and Business in Korea. English listening proficiency levels were designated on the basis of TOEFL listening scores. Subjects listened twice each to texts (more familiar and less familiar). After listening to each text, a ten-item objective test was administered to test the subjects' comprehension of the information presented in the text. Objective tests were analyzed. using repeated measures analysis. A post hoc test was conducted to identify the means that were significantly different. This study yielded the following results: (1) subjects with high prior knowledge comprehended texts significantly better than did subjects with low prior knowledge; (2) the level of L2 listening proficiency had a significant effect on the L2 listening comprehension of texts, but there was no interaction between prior knowledge and the level of L2 listening proficiency.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.183-189
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• 2020

This study was carried out to find out the acquisition effect by measurement periods of adult learners learning through English pattern practice. The subjects of this study were divided into adult learner groups including the learners in their 40s and those who were over 65 and the child group who were 8 years old as a comparative group. After the subjects had a pre-test at first, person agreement and tense were instructed though English pattern practice and right after that, they had a post-test. Then 4 weeks later, they had a delayed test. As a result, the acquisition result of adult learners learning though English pattern practice showed the largest rise by those in their 40s and the learners of those over 65. However the adult learners aged over 65 showed the largest drop in delayed test of the reading comprehension. Based on these results, it is necessary to develop teaching method for adult learners in consideration of their characters and weak points.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.177-197
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• 2009

This study investigated the effects of dictation practice, in terms of listening proficiency and the use of listening strategy. The research was implemented for 15 weeks with 89 freshmen and sophomores at a Korean university. The subjects were divided into an experimental group and a control group. All conditions were the same in both groups, except that the experimental group had dictation practice on a regular basis in their listening classes through one semester. For the purpose of the study, two research questions were set; 1) Does dictation practice improve listening proficiency? 2) What are the differences in the use of listening strategies between the two groups? Does dictation practice make the participants use different listening strategies? A sample TOEIC listening test was conducted as a pre-test and post-test. A questionnaire was used to find out the differences in the use of listening strategies between the two groups. The results of this study reveal that there was no statistically difference in improvement between the two groups; however, the experimental group scored much higher on the post-test than the pre-test compared with the control group. In regard to listening strategies, among 6 listening strategies, the use of metacognitive listening strategies had a significant difference between the two groups. On the basis of the results, the study suggested some guidelines for dictation practice in EFL listening classes and called for more studies on its effects.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.19-26
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• 2017

The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of utterance internal pause in English speaking evaluation. To avoid possible confusion with other errors caused by segmental and prosodic inaccuracy, stem utterances with two different length obtained from a native speaker were manipulated to make a set of stimuli tokens through insertion of pauses whose length and position vary. After a total of 90 participants classified into three proficiency groups rated the stimuli, the scored data set was statistically analyzed in terms of the mixed effects model. It was confirmed that predictors such as pause length, pause position and utterance length significantly influence raters' evaluation scores. Especially, a dominating effect was found in such a way that raters gradually deducted scores in accordance with the increase of pause duration. In another experiment, a tree-based statistical learning technique was utilized to check which of the significant predictors played a more influential role than others. The findings in this paper are expected to be practically informative for both the test takers who are preparing for an English speaking test and the raters who desire to develop more objective rubric of speaking evaluation.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.3 no.9
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• pp.381-388
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• 2014

In this paper, we deal with implementation issues of an unknown word classifier for middle-school level English writing test. We define the type of unknown words occurred in English text and discuss the detection process for unknown words. Also, we define the type of swear words occurred in students's English writings, and suggest how to handle this type of words. We implement an unknown word classifier with a swear detection module for developing an automatic English writing scoring system. By experiments with actual test data, we evaluate the accuracy of the unknown word classifier as well as the swear detection module.