• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.821-841
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• 2009

This paper explores the ways to reshape humanistic values of the curriculum of the English department of Korean universities. The English curricula are usually composed of three fields of literary studies, general education, and English proficiency, whose conventional humanistic values have been currently dwindling. As for literary studies, teaching literature still hovers over the canonical works of past decades, not allowing students to access the canon with their own ideas and ending up with authoritative monologues. The general education field leans toward edited texts rather than authentic ones, which ignores a genuine path of communication between the author and its readers. Subjects for English proficiency such as "TOEIC" tend to be taught online with no teacher's presence for the nominal purpose of optimizing economic efficiency in teaching. All these testify to the attenuation of humanistic values in the curriculum, which motivates us to suggest some ways to reshape the values. Authoritative monologue in teaching literature can be shifted to the open-ended conversation by using role-play methods as well as accepting extra-canonical works into the curriculum. Authentic texts for general education prove to be preferred by students with the successful result of our experiment. Lastly, it is teacher's presence in the class that helps get higher achievement of "TOEIC" than some online classes. As suggested above, open-ended conversation, wider communication between author and readers, and human presence of the class will help reshape humanistic values in the English curriculum.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.187-210
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• 2006

This study aims to investigate the effects of the implementation of self-directed learning through the homepage between the teacher and the students for English reading classes. The study focuses on the questions of whether the self-directed learning through the homepage, compared to the teacher-centered learning, would enable a significantly positive change in the students' achievements and of what their responses to this new learning method are. 72 students were grouped into an experimental and a control group, and then each group was subdivided into three levels (high, medium, low) of proficiency. Findings demonstrate that the experimental group showed statistically more significant increases in their scores of reading proficiency test than the control group. For the question of students' responses to the learning experience, the three groups within the experimental group responded to a questionnaire survey with regard to the positive attitude of learning, the effectiveness of self-directed learning and its learning materials, and usability of the homepage. In general, the experimental group considered the experience satisfactory, although the degree of positive responses varied according to the proficiency level of the group. This suggests the importance and effectiveness of self-directed learning using the computer and internet as a supplementary learning tool.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.287-304
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• 2005

Since Air and Correspondence High School (ACHS) in Korea was established in 1974, it has been serving many people who couldn't take the opportunities for learning in the regular high school due to several reasons. Regardless of the rapid change in technologies and educational needs during the past 31 years, however, ACHS hasn't changed much. Concerns have been recently made about the validity of the unchanged school system and many issues have been discussed relating to the innovation of the school system. Focusing on the teaching and learning contents, one of the important issues with respect to the school system, this paper examines the 7th English Curriculum for ACHS. The paper also investigates the textbooks used in ACHS to see how closely they align with the students' English proficiency and ACHS' instructional method by employing McDonough and Shaw's(1993) framework for textbook analysis. The results revealed that the current curriculum does not sufficiently reflect ACHS's characteristics, which leads to the adoption and development of inappropriate textbooks in terms of overall coherence, proficiency level, etc. The results suggest that the development of the curriculum and textbooks for ACHS should be based upon the students' needs and their level of proficiency rather than depending on the national curriculum and government-authorized textbooks intended for the relatively homogeneous school-age learners.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aviation and Aeronautics
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.12-20
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• 2020

The purpose of this study was to analyze the face validity of the revised EPTA (English Proficiency Test for Aviation) to see if the tests actually contribute to the enhancement of aviation safety and achieve the purpose of the assessment. In order to reach the above objectives, 103 pilot test takers were surveyed, and nine in-depth interviewees were selected and interviewed. In addition, detailed research results were derived by dividing the participants into the pilot's flight experience (31 captain pilots, 42 first officer pilots, and 30 general commercial pilots). As a result, pilot participants were generally aware that EPTA was more reasonable because the revised EPTA properly implemented the aviation situation and gave participants motivation to learn aviation English. It was also seen that first officer pilots had a higher face validity of EPTA than captain and general commercial pilots. The reason was that first officer pilots considered air traffic control job was more important than other pilots did.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.35-49
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• 2022

This study examines crosslinguistic influence on the use of concessive conditionals by Japanese EFL learners. Contrastive analysis suggests that Japanese native speakers may overuse the concessive conditional even if due to partial similarities to Japanese concessive conditionals, whose formal and semantic restrictions are fewer than those of English concessive conditionals. This hypothesis is tested using data from the written module of the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). Comparison of Japanese native speakers with English native speakers and Chinese native speakers reveals the following trends. First, Japanese native speakers tend to overuse concessive conditionals compared to native speakers, while similar overuse is not observed in Chinese native speaker data. Second, non-nativelike uses of even if appear in contexts allowing the use of concessive conditionals in Japanese. Third, while overuse and infelicitous use of even if is observed at all proficiency levels, formal errors are restricted to learners at lower proficiency levels. These findings suggest that crosslinguistic influence does occur in the use of concessive conditionals, and that its particular realization is affected by L2 proficiency, with formal crosslinguistic influence mediated at an earlier stage than semantic cross-linguistic influence.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.3
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• pp.203-229
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• 1997

This paper is to examine a desirable and promising approach to an effective English teaching in elementary schools. Teachers' understanding English curriculum, teaching methodology, language skills-listening and speaking, and their testing of spoken communication is necessary for students' better learning in their English classes. Thus detailed explanations of English curriculum are presented, and background knowledge of major traditional teaching methods as well as recent trends is discussed. Especially, for the purpose of developing students' English communicative proficiency. classroom teaching and testing techniques of listening and speaking are also discussed with examples.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.25-49
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• 2006

Though a large amount of research concerning listening strategies has been conducted, the strategic behaviors of younger students in this area have received less attention. This study is a follow up study of an earlier case study by the author (2006). The purpose of this study is to verify what listening strategies Korean elementary learners use in a general L2 listening situation. 213 elementary students participated in this study, and a listening strategy questionnaire was used. ANOVA, MANOVA, Correlation and Multiple Regression Analysis were used to interpret the data. The results of this study reveal that younger participants used all four types of listening strategies, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive and affective, fairly often; however, the results also show that they differ in how frequently they use each strategy according to their listening proficiency. Overall, highly proficient learners use more strategies compared to less proficient learners. High proficiency learners use compensation strategies most and cognitive strategies least. Low proficient learners use affective strategies most and compensation strategies least. Moreover, the results showed no significant grade- or gender-related strategic behaviors, and also showed that L2 listening proficiency can be a significant predictor of strategic behavior of young learners. 12% of the variance in L2 strategic behaviors was attributable to L2 listening proficiency.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2011

Listening has been a neglected research area despite the crucial role it plays. The present investigation was aimed at examining how the provision of topical knowledge and learners' listening proficiency level affect learners' listening performance under four different preparatory activity conditions: topical knowledge, vocabulary list, language structure, and no activity. A total of 134 participants, assigned to the four different activity groups, took part in the study. The results revealed that the learners who were provided with topical knowledge before listening performed significantly better than the other learners, followed by the vocabulary list group and language structure group, which might be attributed to the activation of their content schemata. The learners who did not perform any preparatory activities achieved the lowest scores. When it comes to the impact of listening proficiency, it was revealed that learners' proficiency level had a significant influence on learners' listening performance, and there was a significant interaction between the learners' level of listening proficiency and preparatory activity. Providing relevant knowledge was effective for both higher level and lower level learners, whereas teaching vocabulary before listening was effective for higher level learners but was not for lower level ones. Based on the results, some pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research were discussed.

• MALSORI
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• no.57
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• pp.31-42
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to observe how Korean learners perceive an English weak syllable in words containing WS syllable pattern. According to the automated discrimination task using E-Prime, the ratio of correct answer(%) and reaction time of the stimuli with same syllable patterns were respectively higher and faster than those with different syllable patterns. Specifically, in the stimuli with different syllable patterns, the frequency(familiarity) of stressed word succeeding weak syllable and whether the weak syllable had coda in it were two important factors in distinguishing between a word with and without weak syllable. Even though the high English proficiency Koreans had faster reaction time than the low English proficiency Koreans, all Korean learners had a difficulty in perceiving the weak syllable at the beginning of a word.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.81-88
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• 2007

This study deals with the overall meta-cognitive aspects of ATC-Pilot miscommunications pertinent to cognitive human errors based on the previous literature research which it has been focused on the issue of the global aviation English use in regard with aircraft accident and incident. Especially, it addresses the concern over the ICAO aviation English language proficiency evaluation program which will be implemented globally in March, 2008. In addition, It presents the analysis related to the on-going English language proficiency level four test conducted for Korean civil airlines pilots and air traffic controllers.