• Title/Summary/Keyword: English nouns

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Language Education Policy and English Textbooks of Korea and Japan

  • Chang, Bok-Myung;Owada, Kazuhara
    • International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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    • v.9 no.2
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    • pp.56-63
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    • 2021
  • The aim of this study is to understand how English textbooks in Korea and Japan reflect English education policies for improving the English language learners' cultural ability. In order to achieve the purpose of this study, the method of analyzing English textbooks was used because English textbooks are an important tool that most specifically reflects the English policy of a country. This study analyzed a total of six English textbooks, three middle school English textbooks currently used in Korea and three in Japan. We analyzed nouns/pronouns related to culture presented in the reading section included in each unit, and compared cultural diversity and cultural identity included in English textbooks in Korea and Japan. As a result, it was found that both countries experienced cultural diversity through English education and introduced their cultural pride to Western culture to realize the goal of strengthening global capabilities. This textbook analysis results show that English textbooks of Korea and Japan depend on American/British cultures and norms. The cultural contents of English textbooks in Korea and Japan tend to focus on geography, food and drink, festivals and activities, family and education systems, etc. And English textbooks in Korea and Japan include the cultural sections in each lesson, but they don't suggest how to relate these cultural sections into the learners' real experiences. These results can be utilized as the motives from which both countries develop English education policy and textbooks in the future.

Automatic Construction of a Concept Hierarchy from Coordinated Noun Phrases

  • No, Yong-Kyoon
    • Language and Information
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    • v.11 no.1
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    • pp.39-52
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    • 2007
  • Noun phrase coordination is an extremely productive phenomenon. Based on an observation that conjuncts tend to denote semantically related concepts, we collect four hundred thousand pairs of conjuncts from the British National Corpus, in an attempt to build an is-a hierarchy of English noun concepts. The modifiedness patterns of the two words in these pairs point to three distinct semantic relations: sibling, cousin, and ancestor-or-ancestor' sibling. The process of finding them and how these pairs are used to motivate groups of quasi-synonyms and then to locate the hypernyms are discussed.

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The effects of focus-on-form instruction on EFL learners' English writing ability: An inquiry for teaching business English writing (형태에 초점을 맞춘 교수가 영어쓰기 능력에 미치는 영향: 비즈니스 영작문 교육을 위한 탐색)

  • Kim, Bu-Ja
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.11 no.1
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    • pp.77-98
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    • 2005
  • The purpose of the study is to investigate whether focus-on-form instruction is effective in promoting accuracy in writing and to make some suggestions regarding education in business English writing. For this purpose, an experiment, of which the participants were 29 college sophomores taking a course in business English, was made. The learners received instruction in the English nouns followed by modificatory phrases or clauses through the focus-on-form techniques, feedback and explicit explanation. The results were as follows: First, the learners who received focus-on-form instruction improved accuracy in writing. Second, there was a correlation between the learners' English proficiency levels and the effects of focus-on-form instruction. Third, the high level learners showed more positive attitude toward focus-on-form instruction than the low level ones. To promote accuracy in written business communication, the following suggestions were made on the basis of the results: First, focus-on-form instruction should be incorporated into a content-based business English class. Second, repeated focus-on-form instruction is needed. Third, learners' English proficiency levels should be taken into account when focus-on-form instruction is given.

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Word class information in perception of prosodic prominence by Korean learners of English

  • Im, Suyeon
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.11 no.4
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    • pp.1-8
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    • 2019
  • This study aims to investigate how prosodic prominence is perceived in relation to word class information (or parts-of-speech) by Korean learners of English compared with native English speakers in public speech. Two groups, Korean learners of English and native English speakers, were asked to judge words perceived as prominent simultaneously while listening to a speech. Parts-of-speech and three acoustic cues (i.e., max F0, mean phone duration, and mean intensity) were analyzed for each word in the speech. The results showed that content words tended to be higher in pitch and longer in duration than function words. Both groups of listeners rated prominence on content words more frequently than on function words. This tendency, however, was significantly greater for Korean learners of English than for native English speakers. Among the parts-of-speech of the content words, Korean learners of English were more likely than native English speakers to judge nouns and verbs as prominent. This study presents evidence that Korean learners of English consider most, if not all, content words as landing locations of prosodic prominence, in alignment with the previous study on the production of prominence.

Automatic Construction of Foreign Word Transliteration Dictionary from English-Korean Parallel Corpus (영-한 병렬 코퍼스로부터 외래어 표기 사전의 자동 구축)

  • Lee, Jae Sung
    • The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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    • v.6 no.2
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    • pp.9-21
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    • 2003
  • This paper proposes an automatic construction system for transliteration dictionary from English-Korean parallel corpus. The system works in 3 steps: it extracts all nouns from Korean documents as the first step, filters transliterated foreign word nouns out of them with the language identification method as the second step, and extracts the corresponding English words by using a probabilistic alignment method as the final step. Specially, the fact that there is a corresponding English word in most cases, is utilized to extract the purely transliterated part from a Koreans word phrase, which is usually used in combined forms with Korean endings(Eomi) or particles(Josa). Moreover, the direct phonetic comparison is done to the words in two different alphabet systems without converting them to the same alphabet system. The experiment showed that the performance was influenced by the first and the second preprocessing steps; the most efficient model among manually preprocessed ones showed 85.4% recall, 91.0% precision and the most efficient model among fully automated ones got 68.3% recall, 89.2% precision.

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Some Issues on Causative Verbs in English

  • Cho, Sae-Youn
    • Language and Information
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    • v.13 no.1
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    • pp.77-92
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    • 2009
  • Geis (1973) has provided various properties of the subjects and by + Gerund Phrase (GerP) in English causative constructions. Among them, the two main issues of Geis's analysis are as follows: unlike Lakoff (1965; 1966), the subject of English causative constructions, including causative-inchoative verbs such as liquefy, first of all, should be acts or events, not persons, and the by + GerP in the construction is a complement of the causative verbs. In addition to these issues, Geis has provided various data exhibiting other idiosyncratic properties and proposed some transformational rules such as the Agent Creation Rule and rule orderings to explain them. Against Geis's claim, I propose that English causative verbs require either Proper nouns or GerP subjects and that the by + GerP in the constructions as a Verbal Modifier needs Gerunds, whose understood Affective-agent subject is identical to the subject of causative verbs with respect to the semantic index value. This enables us to solve the two main issues. At the same time, the other properties Geis mentioned also can be easily accounted for in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) by positing a few lexical constraints. On this basis, it is shown that given the few lexical constraints and existing grammatical tools in HPSG, the constraint-based analysis proposed here gives a simpler explanation of the properties of English causative constructions provided by Geis without transformational rules and rule orderings.

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Focus Realization of English Noun Phrases in the Classroom Situation (교실 상황에서 영어 명사구의 초점 실현 양상)

  • Jun, Ji-Hyun;Song, Jae-Yung;Lee, Dong-Hwa;Kim, Kee-Ho
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.9 no.2
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    • pp.109-132
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    • 2002
  • The purpose of this study is to examine the focus realization of [Adjective+Noun] phrases which are used in English classroom situations. In order to examine this, two production and one perception experiments were designed. The noun phrases in the first two production experiments are divided into three patterns according to the location of focus. The difference between the two production experiments is that in the first experiment the focused words are contextually given in the classroom situation, but in the second experiment they are presented in written form. We compare the native English teachers' focus realization of noun phrases with that of Korean teachers from the point of view of intonational phonology. In the perception test, we examine how the uttered sentences are perceived by English native speakers and Korean native speakers. The results from the three experiments show that native English teachers' focus realization is quite consistent with informational structure. Also, there is a significant difference in pitch range of adjectives and nouns when the native speakers give pitch accents on the two content words, and the uttered sentences are mostly perceived as well as the speakers' intentions. As for Korean speakers, however, they usually focus only on the adjective or they focus on both the adjective and the noun, regardless of the relative informativeness of these words. From these findings, we can conclude that focus realization of Korean teachers is rather inconsistent with respect to informational structure when compared to that of native English teachers.

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Comparison of vowel lengths of articles and monosyllabic nouns in Korean EFL learners' noun phrase production in relation to their English proficiency (한국인 영어학습자의 명사구 발화에서 영어 능숙도에 따른 관사와 단음절 명사 모음 길이 비교)

  • Park, Woojim;Mo, Ranm;Rhee, Seok-Chae
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.12 no.3
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    • pp.33-40
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    • 2020
  • The purpose of this research was to find out the relation between Korean learners' English proficiency and the ratio of the length of the stressed vowel in a monosyllabic noun to that of the unstressed vowel in an article of the noun phrases (e.g., "a cup", "the bus", etcs.). Generally, the vowels in monosyllabic content words are phonetically more prominent than the ones in monosyllabic function words as the former have phrasal stress, making the vowels in content words longer in length, higher in pitch, and louder in amplitude. This study, based on the speech samples from Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC) and Rated Korean-Spoken English Corpus (Rated K-SEC), examined 879 English noun phrases, which are composed of an article and a monosyllabic noun, from sentences which are rated on 4 levels of proficiency. The lengths of the vowels in these 879 target NPs were measured and the ratio of the vowel lengths in nouns to those in articles was calculated. It turned out that the higher the proficiency level, the greater the mean ratio of the vowels in nouns to the vowels in articles, confirming the research's hypothesis. This research thus concluded that for the Korean English learners, the higher the English proficiency level, the better they could produce the stressed and unstressed vowels with more conspicuous length differences between them.

Identifying Key Grammatical Errors of Japanese English as a Foreign Language Learners in a Learner Corpus: Toward Focused Grammar Instruction with Data-Driven Learning

  • Atsushi Mizumoto;Yoichi Watari
    • Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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    • v.4 no.1
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    • pp.25-42
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    • 2023
  • The number of studies on data-driven learning (DDL) has increased in recent years, and DDL's overall effectiveness as an L2 (second language) teaching methodology has been reported to be high. However, the degree of its effectiveness in grammar instruction, particularly for the goal of correcting errors in L2 writing, is still unclear. To provide guidelines for focused grammar instruction with DDL in the Japanese classroom setting, we aimed to identify the typical grammatical errors made by Japanese learners in the Cambridge Learner Corpus First Certificate in English (CLC FCE) dataset. The results revealed that three error types (nouns, articles, and prepositions) should be addressed in DDL grammar instruction for Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. In light of the findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions for future DDL research and practice are discussed.