• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.171-187
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• 2012

This study aims to investigate the effects of learning strategy-based early reading instruction for English underachieving students. For this purpose of the study, sixteen learning strategies were driven from the review of previous related literature and the result of the survey conducted to the students and the teachers. Strategy integrated early reading instruction was implemented to nine students for thirteen weeks. The word recognition test was conducted before and after the instruction to examine whether the instruction had effects on the increase of their early reading skill. In addition, in order to investigate certain change in students' affective aspects after the instruction. The research conducted survey to the students. A teacher's field note and students' class journal were also analyzed to verify the results from the quantitative test. The results indicated that the instruction led to the increase of students' early reading skills. It was also found that the instruction motivated the underachieving students to devise a strategy for their learning process.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.173-181
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• 2007

This is a semantic pilot study which concentrates on how people in Taiwan process the temporal metaphors, ego-moving metaphor and time-moving metaphor. Motivated by the research of Gentner, Imai, and Boroditsky (2002) in which the English native speakers comprehend ego-moving metaphors faster than time-moving metaphors, the present study attempts to reexamine whether the faster reaction to ego-moving metaphors is shared by both the Chinese native speakers and EFL learners. To achieve the goals, 25 Chinese/English bilinguals are invited to be examined via the16 Chinese and 16 English test sentences. The recordings of their accuracy on each item are served as the databases used to compare with the study of Gentner, Imai, and Boroditsky (2002). The two finding presented here are: (1) when the subjects tested in their native language, Chinese, they process ego-moving metaphors better. (2) when tested in the foreign language, English, they conceptualize time-moving metaphors much better.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1193-1220
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• 2009

This study examined the impact of sonority profiles, positional differences and L2 proficiency on Korean EFL learners' perception of English biconsonantal clusters, using nonce words. The overall results showed that major predictions of the sonority-based typological markedness on consonant clusters were supported, as obstruent plus sonorant and sonorant plus obstruent sequences were better perceived than obstruent only or sonorant only sequences. Yet, some consonant clusters did not show a preference for sonority profiles. Positional effects were also confirmed, as word-initial biconsonantal clusters were better perceived than wordfinal ones across all the participant groups. Participants' English proficiency turned out to be also important in the perception of consonant clusters, since university students' mean rate of accuracy was highest, followed by that of high school students, which in turn followed by that of middle school students. Further, the effects of other factors like frequency and stimuli on speech perception were also addressed, along with some implications for future research.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1163-1190
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• 2010

Korean EFL learners' stylistic sensitivity was examined through the two types of letter writing, professional and personal. The base of comparison with the English native speakers' stylistic sensitivity was the linguistic style markers that were statistically found by Biber's (1988) multi-dimensional model of variation of English language. The main finding was that Korean university students were sensitive to stylistic difference in the correct direction, though their linguistic repertoire was limited to the easy and simple linguistic features. Also, the learners were skewed in the involved style in both types of the letters unlike the native speakers and it was interpreted as due to the general developmental direction from informal to formal linguistic style. Learners were also skewed in the explicit style in both types of letters unlike the native speakers and it was interpreted as due to the learners' heavy reliance on one particular linguistic feature. As a whole, the learners' stylistic sensitivity heavily relied on the small number of linguistic features that they have already acquired, which happen to be simple and basic linguistic features.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.240-242
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• 2007

The goal of this paper is to investigate effects of three prosodic factors, such as phrasal accent (accented vs. unaccented), prosodic boundary (IP-initial vs. IP-medial) and coda voicing (e.g., bed vs. bet), on acoustic realization of English vowels (/i, $_I/$, $/{\varepsilon}$, ${\ae}/$) as produced by native (Canadian) and nonnative (Korean) speakers. The speech corpus included 16 minimal pairs (e.g., bet-bat, bet-bed) embedded in a sentence. Results show that phonological contrast between vowels are maximized when they were accented, though the contrast maximization pattern was not the same between the English and Korean speakers. However, domain-initial position do not affect the phonetic manifestation of vowels. Results also show that phonological contrast due to coda voicing is maximized only when the vowels are accented. These results propose that the phonetic realization of vowels is affected by phrasal accent only, and not by the location within prosodic position.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1245-1261
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• 2009

The purpose of this paper is to show the internal structure of the socalled sentential subject constructions in English. The constructions that we examine in this paper are such as It seems that John failed in the syntax exam vs. *That John failed in the syntax exam seems and It really stinks that the Giants lost the World Series vs. That the Giants lost the World Series really stinks. As seen above, the English verb seem does not tolerate the sentential subject. This is in sharp contrast to other English verbs such as suck, blow, bite, and stink, which do allow the sentential subject. There are several issues regarding these constructions. First, where is the sentential subject located? Second, is the sentential subject assigned structural Case? Third, is the sentential subject extraposed or does it remain in its base-generated complement position? Fourth, is the sentential subject a base-generated topic in the specifier position of CP, as Arlenga (2005) claims? In this paper, we argue that sentential subjects are base-generated in the specifier of the verbal phrase in case of stink-type verbs, while they are licensed as a complement to verbs like seem. We also argue that a sentential subject can be raised in the seem-type verbal constructions, if it were part of the complement small clause.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.651-674
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• 2011

This paper approaches Sir Thomas More, Coriolanus, Pericles in terms of the relationship of food to national identity. These three plays examine ways in which food is essential to what constitutes English national identity, and food shortages give rise to riots thereby throwing everyday life into disorder. In Sir Thomas More food shortages are caused by foreign foodstuff and foreign habits of consumption. Rioting Londoners fear that the European foreigners' strange dietary habits would do harm on English food, the English body and English economy. In Coriolanus starvation is the primary trigger for the enmity between the senators and citizens. Menenius employs the fable of the belly to quell the hungry citizens' anger and to emphasize the senators' role as a store of nutrition to feed the body, that is, the citizens. Coriolanus' contempt for the body's need comes to a devastating end. In Pericles the famine is brought about by the gluttonous consumption of specific foods. The problem of greedy consumption becomes that of living in the cannibalistic situation where mothers are willing to eat their children and married couples one another. Pericles feeds the hungry people with bread, and is also saved from starvation by the fishermen after shipwreck. In this way the three plays provide the examples of Shakespeare's notion on healthy food and feeding.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.335-357
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• 2007

This study aims to investigate the pragmatic features of Korean EFL learners' interlanguage in the communicative act of complaining. Since a complaint, by its nature, is likely to cause offence, thereby threatening the social relationship between the speaker and the hearer, making a complaint in a polite manner is of crucial importance in maintaining harmonious social relationships. However, very little research has been carried out on the complaint speech act performances of Korean EFL learners. In particular, studies which attempt to examine the effect of social status on the choice of complaint speech act strategies are rare. The present study compared the complaint speech act performances of Korean EFL learners and those of native speakers of English with respect to social status. 24 Korean EFL learners and 28 native speakers of English participated and the data were collected via a Discourse Completion Test. The findings revealed that Korean EFL learners differed from native English speakers in the use of complaint strategies. These results indicate that Korean EFL learners lack certain important skills necessary to make complaints appropriately, suggesting the need for the foreign language learners to develop a more extensive pragmatic knowledge of complaint strategies.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.129-152
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• 2009

The paper aims to prove symmetries of the left and right edges of a morphological unit through the analysis of English blends. Blends are the words derived from two existing words by snipping the middle parts out and putting the rest together, such as smog (

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.131-158
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• 2006

The purpose of the present study is to explore an effective way of teaching English vocabulary which is geared toward improving students' English communicative competence. This study focuses on English verbs, which may be followed by patterns according to subcategorization. Learning verbs must include learning about patterns as well as meaning in order to improve the ability to use verbs receptively and productively, or communicative competence. On the basis of the language progression proposed by Willis (2003), a teaching strategy which helps learners learn English verb patterns effectively and systematically was proposed. The effect of the teaching strategy was investigated. The subjects of the experimental group who learned English verb patterns intentionally through the teaching strategy proposed by this study significantly improved themselves in the ability to use them receptively and productively. This result shows that the teaching strategy including improvisation, recognition, rehearsal, system building, exploration and consolidation is helpful to improving communicative competence.