• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2003.10a
• /
• pp.37-40
• /
• 2003

This paper presents the preliminary result of the automatic pronunciation scoring for non-native English speakers, and shows the developmental process for an English speech recognizer for the educational and evaluational purposes. The proposed speech recognizer, featuring two refined acoustic model sets, implements the noise-robust data compensation, phonetic alignment, highly reliable rejection, key-word and phrase detection, easy-to-use language modeling toolkit, etc., The developed speech recognizer achieves 0.725 as the average correlation between the human raters and the machine scores, based on the speech database YOUTH for training and K-SEC for test.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.91-108
• /
• 2007

This study investigates learners' perception on their engagement in rating activities in the EFL essay-writing context. The current study aims to address the answers to the following research questions: 1) What attitude do students show about their participation in the rating tasks? and 2) which of three aspects (e.g. the degree of rating experience, the exposure to English composition instruction and learning, and proficiency level) significantly influences learners' rating activities? 104 EFL learners participated in the rater training session. After participants finished rater training session, they rated three sample essays and peer essays using the given scoring guide. Based on the analysis of survey responses that students made, students showed positive attitude toward their engagement in rating tasks. For research question 2, only L2 writing proficiency seriously affected students' perception on the rating tasks. Advanced level of subjects did not feel stressed by a grade of peers as low level of subjects did. They were also critical about the benefits of self- and peer-assessment, suggesting that a peer's feedback on their own essay was not so useful and that a self-rating does not fully help learners identify their writing proficiency.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.12 no.1
• /
• pp.103-129
• /
• 2006

This paper presents a case study of the effectiveness of debate class in promoting speaking skills of advanced learners. The researcher adopted English debate techniques in an English speaking class during four-week teacher training program and investigated how teachers responded to the new technique. Forty-five middle and high school teachers participated in the study and classroom observation, pre-survey, post-survey, and focus group interviews were used as the major research methods. The teacher pre-survey results presented that teachers prefer a conversation class where they can directly acquire proper sentence patterns and speaking strategies rather than spend time in performing communicative events. The results of the focus group interview and post-survey confirmed that a debate class can meet this specific teachers' needs. Most teachers responded positively to the debate classes since: 1) debate techniques are relatively new ideas to Korean teachers; 2) debate techniques require speed and accuracy in speech; thus teachers could learn to present their ideas logically and efficiently in a limited time through repeated argument exercises. The study result implies that debate technique can be an effective vehicle in an EFL context to promote advanced learners' logical thinking skills and logical English sentence structures.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
• /
• v.18 no.5
• /
• pp.985-994
• /
• 2009

This research is exploratory in considering the unique socio-cultural context of South Korea, where the present government is responding to the demand for English language training. The study asked the question: What do mothers experience when sending their young children to a private English institute, so called English kindergarten, instead of a regular preschool? A qualitative approach was used to analyze the in-depth interviews with 19 mothers who sent their young child to an English kindergarten. Mothers stated that their young child needs to be a competent English speaker. The mothers expected that an English kindergarten would prepare their child better for the elementary school English curriculum than a regular preschool. The study revealed that English kindergartens symbolized the precedence and the privileges of the elite because of their high tuition fees, native-speaker teachers, and small class sizes. The mothers showed a sense of pride and vicarious satisfaction from sending their child to an English kindergarten. However, the mothers recognized that English kindergartens put more emphasis on cognitive learning instead of the social development of children. It was almost impossible for mothers to communicate with the native-speaker teachers about their child. The mothers seemed to overlook their child's struggle to adapt to an English Kindergarten. The findings of the study raise issues concerning the boom of teaching young children English in Korea.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.159-166
• /
• 2021

The introduction of the communicative approach in the English language education brings in a Korean the English Program in Korea (EPIK), which is a Korean government sponsored program established 1995. by the Korean Ministry of Education improve Korean students' and teachers' communicative competency in English within the public school system in Korea. For this goal, EPIK invites English speakers from 7 major English-speaking countries. However, the effectiveness of this program has been questioned in Korea. Thus, the objective of this paper is to explore the current status, problems, and the directions for the program to be aimed at, and for the effectiveness of EPIK through investigation of the program. Then this paper presents some possible solutions and suggestions including the possibility of VR use in orientation and training programs in order to empower both Korean teachers of English and English native teachers in Korea.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
• /
• v.16 no.4
• /
• pp.193-202
• /
• 2023

In recent years, the outstanding performance of large language models (LLMs) trained on extensive datasets has become a hot topic. Since studies on LLMs are available on open-source approaches, the ecosystem is expanding rapidly. Models that are task-specific, lightweight, and high-performing are being actively disseminated using additional training techniques using pre-trained LLMs as foundation models. On the other hand, the performance of LLMs for Korean is subpar because English comprises a significant proportion of the training dataset of existing LLMs. Therefore, research is being carried out on Korean-specific LLMs that allow for further learning with Korean language data. This paper identifies trends of open source based LLMs and introduces research on Korean specific large language models; moreover, the applications and limitations of large language models are described.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2000.07a
• /
• pp.235-240
• /
• 2000

In the age of global communication, more human exchange is extended at the grass-roots level. In the old days, language policy and language planning was based on one nation-state with one language. But high waves of globalizaiton have allowed extended human flow of exchange beyond one's national border on a daily basis. Under such circumstances, homogeneity in Japan may not allow Japanese to speak and communicate only in Japanese and only with Japanese people. In Japan, an advisory report was made to the Ministry of Education in June 1996 about what education should be like in the 21st century. In this report, an introduction of English at public elementary schools was for the first time made. A basic policy of English instruction at the elementary school level was revealed. With this concept, English instruction is not required at the elementary school level but each school has their own choice of introducing English as their curriculum starting April 2002. As Baker, Colin (1996) indicates the age of three as being the threshold diving a child becoming bilingual naturally or by formal instruction. Threre is a movement towards making second language acquisition more naturalistic in an educational setting, developing communicative competence in a more or less formal way. From the lesson of the Canadian immersion success, Genesee (1987) stresses the importance of early language instruction. It is clear that from a psycho-linguistic perspective, most children acquire basic communication skills in their first language apparently effortlessly and without systematic and formal instruction during the first six or seven years of life. This innate capacity diminishes with age, thereby making language learning increasingly difficult. The author, being a returnee, experienced considerable difficulty acquiring L2, and especially achieving native-like competence. There will be many hurdles to conquer until Japanese students are able to reach at least a communicative level in English. It has been mentioned that English is not taught to clear the college entrance examination, but to communicate. However, Japanese college entrance examination still makes students focus more on the grammar-translation method. This is expected to shift to a more communication stressed approach. Japan does not have to aim at becoming an official bilingual country, but at least communicative English should be taught at every level in school Mito College is a small two-year co-ed college in Japan. Students at Mito College are basically notgood at English. It has only one department for business and economics, and English is required for all freshmen. It is necessary for me to make my classes enjoyable and attractive so that students can at least get motivated to learn English. My major target is communicative English so that students may be prepared to use English in various business settings. As an experiment to introduce more communicative English, the author has made the following syllabus design. This program aims at training students speak and enjoy English. 90-minute class (only 190-minute session per week is most common in Japanese colleges) is divided into two: The first half is to train students orally using Graded Direct Method. The latter half uses different materials each time so that students can learn and enjoy English culture and language simultaneously. There are no quizes or examinations in my one-academic year program. However, all students are required to make an original English poem by the end of the spring semester. 2-6 students work together in a group on one poem. Students coming to Mito College, Japan have one of the lowest English levels in all of Japan. However, an attached example of one poem made by a group shows that students can improve their creativity as long as they are kept encouraged. At the end of the fall semester, all students are then required individually to make a 3-minute original English speech. An example of that speech contest will be presented at the Convention in Seoul.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.317-337
• /
• 2010

The present study has a dual purpose to investigate the current state of school English library and needs required for its effective use, and to propose a reading program at the school library. The literature on school library was reviewed. A questionnaire survey was done to find out the current situation of English library at the secondary school. The analysis of 26 secondary English teachers' responses reveals that there was the absence of librarians or reading specialists at the school English library. It was also found that the uses of the English library were limited due to the absence of the specialists, no guidelines, and no link between the curriculum and the library use. A case study on a 2-week special reading program at the school English library was conducted and 15 middle school students took part in the project. The participants took pre- and post-tests to identify their reading level using a software and did a variety of reading activities using the books selected according to their level. The comparison of the tests shows that most of the students' reading level improved after the reading program. The analysis of their views on the program and its effects reveals that they gained confidence in reading and their vocabulary understanding was improved. Some suggestions are made for the effective management of the school English library.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.55-62
• /
• 2022

A smart tourism chatbot is needed as a user interface to efficiently provide smart tourism services such as recommended travel products, tourist information, my travel itinerary, and tour guide service to tourists. We have been developed a smart tourism app and a smart tourism information system that provide smart tourism services to tourists. We also developed a smart tourism chatbot service consisting of khaiii morpheme analyzer, rule-based intention classification, and tourism information knowledge base using Neo4j graph database. In this paper, we develop the Korean and English smart tourism Name Entity (NE) datasets required for the development of the NER model using the pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the smart tourism chatbot system. We create the tourism information NER datasets by collecting source data through smart tourism app, visitJeju web of Jeju Tourism Organization (JTO), and web search, and preprocessing it using Korean and English tourism information Name Entity dictionaries. We perform training on the KoBERT-CRF NER model using the developed Korean and English tourism information NER datasets. The weight-averaged precision, recall, and f1 scores are 0.94, 0.92 and 0.94 on Korean and English tourism information NER datasets.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• v.39 no.4
• /
• pp.455-466
• /
• 2017

This study focuses on a method for sequential data augmentation in order to alleviate data sparseness problems. Specifically, we present corpus expansion techniques for enhancing the coverage of a language model. Recent recurrent neural network studies show that a seq2seq model can be applied for addressing language generation issues; it has the ability to generate new sentences from given input sentences. We present a method of corpus expansion using a sentence-chain based seq2seq model. For training the seq2seq model, sentence chains are used as triples. The first two sentences in a triple are used for the encoder of the seq2seq model, while the last sentence becomes a target sequence for the decoder. Using only internal resources, evaluation results show an improvement of approximately 7.6% relative perplexity over a baseline language model of Korean text. Additionally, from a comparison with a previous study, the sentence chain approach reduces the size of the training data by 38.4% while generating 1.4-times the number of n-grams with superior performance for English text.