• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.4
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• pp.53-84
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• 1998

The purposes of the present study were to give the new direction of teaching English based on the 7th English curriculum, and to show some useful insights on English teaching in the 21st century. The 7th English curriculum was developed in two parts: as a required subject and as an elective subject. As a required subject, the English curriculum applies to the third grade of elementary school through to the first grade of high school. The elective subject of the English curriculum applies to the second and third grades of high school. In the 7th curriculum reform, a proficiency-based language program will be applied in the form of intensive and supplementary courses at the same levels irrespective of differences based on students' abilities, schools and regions. Linguistic functions, communicative functions, subject matters are included in the content area in language organization. Limiting the length of sentences is applied at elementary school only and is not applied at higher levels.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.5
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• pp.219-247
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• 1999

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Korean learners of English reset the "prodrop" parameter of Korean into "non-prodrop" parameter of English in the process of English acquisition. An experiment was conducted to 45 Korean learners of English on the prodrop phenomenon, namely on the null referential or null nonreferential subject, and subject-verb agreement by way of grammatical judgment. The results of the experiment are as follows: First, L2 learners follow the parameter of L1, and then reset the parameter of L2 regardless of the parameter of L1 as their L2 abilities advance. Thus, this study provides further support for the hypothesis that universal grammar is available via L1. Second, the referential subject is, at first, easier to acquire than nonreferential subject, and the triggering fact for the switch from [+prodrop] to [-prodrop] was the use of nonreferential subjects. Third, 3rd person agreement has no connection with the acquisition of the prodrop parameter as a result of subject-verb agreement. Therefore, these results indicate that verb agreement is not a trigger for the recognition of the obligatory subject.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.91-98
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• 2013

This study investigates the difference in the evaluation of foreign-accentedness of English pronunciation across subject groups, evaluated accents, and compared components. This study independently evaluates the prosody and segmentals of the foreign-accented English sentences by pairwise difference rating. Using the prosody swapping technique, segmentals and prosody of the English sentences read by native speakers of American English (one male and one female) were combined with the corresponding segmentals and prosody of the English sentences read by male and female native speakers of Chinese, Japanese or Korean (one male and one female from each native language). These stimuli were evaluated by 4 different subject groups: native speakers of American English, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. The results showed that the Japanese subject group scored higher in prosody difference than in segmental difference while the other groups scored the other way around. This study is significant in that the attitude toward the difference in segmentals and prosody of the foreign accents of English varies with the native language of the subject group. In other words, for native speakers of some languages, the difference in prosody could have a greater influence on the foreign-accentedness than the difference in segmentals, while for native speakers of other languages the other way around.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.233-254
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• 2003

This paper analyzed the effect of using a content-based English textbook in teaching English to Korean college students. The textbook reflected the recent trend in EFL/ESL development that subject matters should be taught as part of the language instruction. The analysis of the questionnaire survey conducted to college students at the end of the semester revealed an encouraging result that this new type of ELT college textbook is effective in helping Korean college students prepare for learning their subject areas through English. Based on this positive outcome, a suggestion is made that the current general purpose college English teaching curriculum be shifted toward a content-based specific purpose type to accommodate the increasing demand of learning subject areas through English in colleges in Korea.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.3
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• pp.55-70
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• 1997

This paper aims at showing firstly, that the parameterized Universal Grammar is also accessible in second language acquisition based on the data found in the English Agreement acquisition by Korean speakers and secondly, that the theoretical claim that the acquisition of Agreement is related to the Subject Drop phenomenon can be supported by the second language acquisition data. The functional category AGRP which is crucial here can be parameterized according to its features with Korean of - Agr and English of + Agr. Two groups of 40 each were tested and the result shows that the parameter resetting is possible in terms of the Agreement feature. In addition to Agreement test, three more tests for the distribution of Subject Drop, Subject Raising and NPI (Negative Polarity Items) were conducted in order to find the correlation among those grammatical phenomena. The result is that the acquisition of Agreement and the Subject Drop possibility are correlated but that they are not related to the obligatory Subject Raising process. Finally, NPI distribution test which is supposedly related to the Subject Raising turned out to carry little information since the average grades from both groups were very low.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.5
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• pp.79-101
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• 1999

With the advent of the 6th and the 7th national educational curricula in Korea. English language teaching in communicative perspective has been highly recommended and widely practised in that context. The aim of new approach is to enhance the students' general communication abilities in English. However, English teachers still find it very hard to improve the students' communicative competence in English since English remains to be taught as a school subject. In so far as English is taught as a school subject, students' attention is paid to the formal elements of English and the increase in communicative competence in English is hardly expected Only when the students' attention is paid to the content, their communicative competence is expected to increase. The best way to shift the students' attention from formal elements to content is to teach other school subjects in English, that is, English immersion education. To introduce immersion education to Korea, the two most successful examples of Singapore and Hong Kong are reviewed in terms of language policies and general practices in their primary and secondary schools respectively. To implement the program into Korea, extensive research on it is expected henceforth.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.103-116
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• 2004

Chomsky (2001) and Kitahara's (2002) suggestion that object shift occurs prior to movement of the νP-subject to SPEC-T is not on the right track with respect to the Merge operation. According to the Merge operation, TP is necessarily created earlier than CP. Chomsky (2001) suggests that the probe-goal relation between T and SUBJ is evaluated in the CP after it is known whether the position of as has become a trace losing its phonological content. However, the FocP is not a phase (CP). So, Chomsky (2001) and Kitahara's (2002) suggestion is not correct in the case of the movement of OBJ to the spec of Foc in English, either. The aim of this paper is to show that the νP-subject must move to SPEC- T prior to the consecutive movement of the wh-object to SPEC-C via object shift in English. This derivation obeys Chomsky's (2001) so-called probe-goal matching condition.

• 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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.301-314
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• 2009

This study explores the function of the affixes -en and -ing that could influence the theta-roles of verbs to which the affixes are attached. The two affixes often appear in the synthetic compounds in English. The results are as follows. First, the affixes -en and -ing link the theta-role realized in the subject of the verb to the noun followed, which is proposed as Theta-linking Principle: that is, the affixes -en and -ing link the theta-role realized in the subject of the verb to the noun followed. Second, in the synthetic compounds including the affixes -en and -ing, the left element must not be the subject of the verb, which is the Synthetic Compound Constraint. And the affix -er link thematic roles of the sentential subject, such as Agent, Instrument. Thus, this study aims to find out the function of the affixes on the point of lexical functional approach.