• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.183-189
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• 2021

This study examines the effects of Korean college students' English proficiency and the English text types on their paraphrases. Korean college students with three groups of English proficiency (high, mid, and low) read two types of English texts, causal texts, and argumentative texts, and paraphrased them in English. Students' paraphrase text was evaluated in terms of content (idea exposition, idea development, and wrap up), organization (coherence and cohesion) and language use (grammatical accuracy), and analyzed by MANOVA. As a result, it was found that there was a significant difference in their paraphrase performance according to the participants' English proficiency levels rather than the types of English texts. The results of this study have educational implications for English paraphrase education to prevent plagiarism for Korean university students.

• 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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.185-207
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• 2009

This study investigated the extent of informational text genre appeared in English textbooks at grades six, seven, and nine. Employing content analysis to analyze the literary forms, the researcher identified genre in each reading selection of each English textbook and classified it into six categories - fiction, information, biography, poetry, play, or fantasy. Especially, informational genre was classified further into two subcategories - non-narrative and narrative - in order to investigate the extent of non-narrative informational text only. The text genre was examined by analyzing (a) the number of reading selections representing each genre and (b) the number of words in reading selections devoted to each genre. The most frequent type of genre at grade 6 and 7 was fiction with 94% and 71% respectively, whereas at grade 9 it was devoted to information (51%), followed by fiction (37%). The largest number of words was devoted to fiction with 96% at the sixth grade and 70% at the seventh grade; on the other hand, for grade 9, it was devoted to information (46%), followed by fiction (39%). Although there was variance across different publishers, the informational text genre gained more significance as the grade level increased. In particular, the percentage of reading selections and words devoted to the non-narrative or expository informational genre was overall 4% at grade 6, 17% at grade 7, and 44% at grade 9. The findings demonstrated the need to pay more attention to informational literacy especially in the early grades for the development of balanced genre knowledge.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.365-382
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• 2009

This study aims to examine the reading materials of high school English textbooks to propose the integration of the literary texts into reading materials in the classroom for development of communicative competence. Five kinds of high school English textbooks were critically examined in terms of three factors -limited text types, deficit of emotional adjectives and non-authenticity- selected by the author as characteristics of non-communicative language teaching materials. With regard to text types, more than half of the reading materials were expository and simple narratives. This imbalance of text types led materials to the deficit of emotional vocabulary. These factors seem to be closely related to the issue of authenticity of reading materials. Compared to the authentic texts, fabricated texts are likely to make reading vapid and boring task. On the basis of these results, some pedagogical suggestions are made.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.631-640
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• 2023

Short-text similarity calculation is one of the hot issues in natural language processing research. The conventional keyword-overlap similarity algorithms merely consider the lexical item information and neglect the effect of the word order. And some of its optimized algorithms combine the word order, but the weights are hard to be determined. In the paper, viewing the keyword-overlap similarity algorithm, the short English text similarity algorithm based on lexical chunk theory (LC-SETSA) is proposed, which introduces the lexical chunk theory existing in cognitive psychology category into the short English text similarity calculation for the first time. The lexical chunks are applied to segment short English texts, and the segmentation results demonstrate the semantic connotation and the fixed word order of the lexical chunks, and then the overlap similarity of the lexical chunks is calculated accordingly. Finally, the comparative experiments are carried out, and the experimental results prove that the proposed algorithm of the paper is feasible, stable, and effective to a large extent.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.13-20
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• 2016

This study explores the effects of an video-recording English speaking task model on learners. The learning model, a form of mobile learning, was developed to facilitate the learners' output practice applying advantages of a smartphone and Text-to Speech. The survey results shows the positive effects of the speaking task on the domain of pronunciation, speaking, listening, writing in terms of students' confidence, as well as general English ability. The study further examines the possibilities and limitations of the speaking task in assisting Korean learners improve their speaking ability, who do not have sufficient exposure to English input or output practice due to the situational limitations where English is learned as a foreign language.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.139-157
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• 2006

As the Communicative Approach has become the norm in foreign language teaching, the objectives of teaching English in school have changed radically in Korea. The focus in high school English textbooks has shifted from mere mastery of structures to communicative proficiency. This paper will study five polysemous words which appear in twelve high school English textbooks used in Korea. The twelve text books are incorporated into a single corpus and analyzed to classify the usage of the selected words. Then the usage of each word was compared with that of three other corpora based sources: the BNC(British National Corpus) Sampler, ICE Singapore(International Corpus of English for Singapore) and Collins COBUILD learner's dictionary which is based on the corpus, "The Bank of English". The comparisons carried out as part of this study will demonstrate that Korean text books do not always supply the full range of meanings of polysemous words.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.179-208
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• 2001

Using literary materials as resources for English learning rather than an object of literary study can be a genuine tool for the students to learn English in the form of oral and written communication. This case study treated the applications of a whole text to the overall course divided into pre-reading activities, while-reading activities, and post-reading activities and the applications of some partial passages extracted from various texts to teaching objectives with many levels of difficulty. This study found that literary texts could be good materials to teach the target language in EFL setting. The English-speaking students with little linguistic competence as a foreign language may be limited in learning English at first, but soon they can accelerate their linguistic competence by reinforcing the literary competence through the literary texts. To achieve effectively a desired goal through the use of literary texts as resources for language development several concrete techniques should be introduced: teacher-guided question strategies laying a central emphasis on the text itself, a problem-solving ability through student-centered activities, process-based and open-ended activities should be presented in a variety of ways using many appropriate activities according to teaching procedure with a careful selection of the texts.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.13-20
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• 2023

This study explores the potential of automated speech recognition (ASR) in assessing English learners' pronunciation. We employed ASR technology, acknowledged for its impartiality and consistent results, to analyze speech audio files, including synthesized speech, both native-like English and Korean-accented English, and speech recordings from a native English speaker. Through this analysis, we establish baseline values for the word error rate (WER). These were then compared with those obtained for human raters in perception experiments that assessed the speech productions of 30 first-year college students before and after taking a pronunciation course. Our sub-group analyses revealed positive training effects for Whisper, an ASR tool, and human raters, and identified distinct human rater strategies in different assessment aspects, such as proficiency, intelligibility, accuracy, and comprehensibility, that were not observed in ASR. Despite such challenges as recognizing accented speech traits, our findings suggest that digital tools such as ASR can streamline the pronunciation assessment process. With ongoing advancements in ASR technology, its potential as not only an assessment aid but also a self-directed learning tool for pronunciation feedback merits further exploration.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.113-137
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• 2005

The purpose of this research is to introduce a new pedagogy for developing English education in the university. It is based on the favorable results of the application of Network English, which is a method that has been used in three classes at Y University for a period of one semester. Network English is a kind of integrated teaching method of offline and online education, and can be a learner-oriented educational method. The online aspect gives learners easier access to the text, regardless of time and place. And in addition to the characteristic of online itself, the various contents in conformity with the learning ability of learners are provided in the text, in order that the learners can get and maintain a desire for study without losing their interest in English. Although the offline part is not much different from traditional classes, the offline education can complement the deficiency of the online and also offer the learners the opportunity for questions and answers. From the results of application of Network English in three classes, the students were satisfied with the method and have more interest in English, which resulted in better grades.