• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.125-146
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• 2015

This study investigated the contribution of Korean phonological awareness to English phonological awareness and the relations of phonological awareness with reading and writing in Korean Hangul and English among Korean 5th graders. With age and vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled, Korean phonological awareness was transferred to English phonological awareness. Specifically, syllable and phoneme awareness in Korean transferred to syllable awareness in English, and Korean phoneme awareness transferred to English phoneme awareness. In addition, English phoneme awareness independently explained significant variance of reading and writing in Korean and English after controlling for age and vocabulary. Syllable awareness in Korean and English explained Hangul reading and writing, respectively. The results suggest cross-language transfer of phonological awareness that is a metalinguistic skill. Phoneme awareness is important in reading and writing in English whereas both of syllable and phoneme awareness are important in literacy of Korean.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.255-272
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• 2011

As the demand of English education is increasing, the demand for Native English speaking teachers (NEST) is rising, especially in Asian countries. However, due to the low number of NEST, the Korean government is suggesting that Filipino Women be used as English teachers as an alternative. This study aims to answer three questions: (1) are Filipino women in Korea qualified to teach English based on the error analysis of their written essays? (2) what are the linguistic features found in their diagnostic essays? and (3) is their written English better than Korean college students' written English based on the comparison of the two groups? The findings from the Filipino participants show the most frequently occurring errors are related to punctuation usage (commas and hyphens), vocabulary (word choice), verb usage, redundancy, and even as basic as capitalization usage. The results from the comparison of the two groups show that the percentage of the Filipino participants' written error was 14% while the percentage of the Korean participants was 17%. The findings would give us some ideas on the qualification of Filipino women in Korea as English teachers.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.1-24
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• 2006

This study investigated differences in beliefs about English learning of 286 EFL college students and 52 English teachers in Korea. Data was collected using Horwitz's Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory and compared between students and teachers in beliefs. To address the research questions, the data were analyzed through descriptive statistics including frequencies, factor analysis, MANOVA, ANOVA, t-test, and reliability coefficients. The results showed four factors in student beliefs: Difficulty of learning English, nature of learning English, importance of correctness in learning English, and motivation and perceived importance of learning English. Clear differences were found in students and teachers' beliefs in English learning aptitude and importance of translation, error correction, and grammar rules. A few belief differences were also identified between Koreans and native-speaking English teachers related to the importance of vocabulary learning, pronunciation, and cultural knowledge. The findings of the study indicated that background variables such as gender and major field of study have an effect on student beliefs about L2 learning. The present study also provided pedagogical considerations to reduce mismatch between students and teachers beliefs and to improve the L2 planning and instruction.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.193-206
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• 2011

The purpose of the study is to examine the use of emotion vocabulary by Korean English learners. Three basic emotion fields, pleasure, anger, and fear were selected to elicit the participants' responses. L1 English speakers' data was also collected for comparison. The major results are as follows. First, English learners responded with various inappropriate verb forms like I feel~, I am~ while the majority of English native speaking teachers responded with subjunctive forms like I would feel~. In addition, L2 English learners used mostly simple and coordination sentences. Second, the lexical richness, measured through type/token ratio, was higher in English L1 data than in English L2 data. The proportion of emotion lemmas reflects the lexical richness or the diversity of the emotion words. Lastly, L2 English learners' responses focused on a few typical adjectives like happy, angry and scared. This structural and semantic distinctiveness of Korean English learners' emotion words was discussed from pedagogical perspectives.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.157-175
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to compare learners' view on Korean and native teachers of English with regard to competence of teaching skills. A total of 166 high school students attending the same high school in Korea participated in a questionnaire survey. The students were asked a series of questions about their five Korean teachers of English and three natives. The analysis of the results indicates that the learners believed Korean English teachers would be better in teaching vocabulary, grammar and reading than native English teachers. The learners answered native English teachers would be better in teaching speaking, listening, and writing. In the areas of the accuracy of classroom language, the level of teacher-centeredness, and the amount of cultural information given in a classroom, there were no significant differences in the learners' responses between Korea and native teacher of English. By recognizing the differences of the learners' views on two different types of ELT teachers, we suggest that it would be beneficial for learners if we would utilize their views in designing and administrating a team-teaching program.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.1-25
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• 2011

This research primarily aimed to investigate proficient and less proficient EFL readers' awareness and experiences about learning to read and reading in English. The secondary purpose was to explore the participants' reading strategies, and to discover how the genres of English texts influence their reading processing behaviors. The participants consisted of four college students in engineering aged 21-25 years. Three data sources were employed: questionnaires, interviews, and think-alouds. The findings revealed that: (1) the proficient EFL readers judged themselves to be good readers, while the less proficient EFL readers judged themselves to be fair readers; (2) unknown vocabulary was perceived to be the major impediment to reading comprehension; the think-aloud data, however, demonstrated that unknown vocabulary did not significantly interfere with their reading comprehension; (3) regardless of the genre of the text, the participants employed similar reading strategies; (4) the participants were more likely to tolerate ambiguity and predict the content when reading the narrative text than the expository text; (5) there was no set of strategies that distinguished proficient EFL readers from less proficient EFL readers; and (6) when identifying problems, the proficient EFL readers used fix-up strategies more effectively and were better able to provide satisfactory solutions than their counterparts. Pedagogical implications for EFL reading instruction are discussed.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.242-251
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• 2017

For the purposes of this research, a corpus of words was created from the English textbooks of the "First Middle School" for the gifted in North Korea, and using the corpus, their linguistic characteristics were analyzed. Although there have been many studies that identified the traits of English textbooks in the North Korea's general middle school, not much focus has been placed on the English textbooks used at North Korea's First Middle School. Initially, the structure of English textbooks of the first, second, fourth, and sixth grades that had been procured from the Information Center on North Korea was reviewed, after which their corpus was created. Then, by using Wordsmith Tools 7.0, linguistic properties and high frequency content words appeared in the English textbook of the first grade were analyzed specifically. Basic statistical data gathered indicated that while the number of vocabulary did not increase as students progress through the grades, the words used tended to diversify incrementally. In the mean time, a distribution of the high frequency content words by grade illustrated that a big difference was found between the content words used in the English texts of each grade, and it was a subject matter of the texts that determined such difference.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.69-79
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• 2000

This study compared the English and the Korean receptive competency of bilingual children with that of English and Korean monolingual children, respectively. The relation between English and Korean receptive competency of bilingual children was examined by age and gender. Subjects were 27 bilingual, 30 Korean monolingual, 24 English monolingual children. They were administered the revised form of the Peabody Pictures Vocabulary Test in Korean and English versions. Results show that bilingual children's Korean receptive competency is lower than those who spoke only Korean, and bilingual children's English receptive competency was a little lower than those who spoke only English, but the difference narrowerd with age. The relation between Korean and English competency in bilingual children was negative in 4- and 5-year-olds but became positive in 6-year-olds. This study shows that the two points-of-view on bilingual language development should be applied differently depending on children's age.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.127-132
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• 2020

The purpose of this review is to provide local readers, more specifically, Korean student readers who are not all that familiar with the English language a general overview of research articles that have been published in Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research vol. 1, no. 1. A brief summary of each research article focusing on research methods and then followed by an overall review and some insights on research issues will be presented.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.35-42
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• 2013

Developing English-Korean machine translation system requires the construction of information about the languages, and the amount of information in English-Korean transfer dictionary is especially critical to the translation quality. Newly created words are out-of-vocabulary words and they appear as they are in the translated sentence, which decreases the translation quality. Also, compound nouns make lexical and syntactic analysis complex and it is difficult to accurately translate compound nouns due to the lack of information in the transfer dictionary. In order to improve the translation quality of English-Korean machine translation, we must continuously expand the information of the English-Korean transfer dictionary by collecting the out-of-vocabulary words and the compound nouns frequently used. This paper proposes a method for expanding of the transfer dictionary, which consists of constructing corpus from internet newspapers, extracting the words which are not in the existing dictionary and the frequently used compound nouns, attaching meaning to the extracted words, and integrating with the transfer dictionary. We also develop the tool supporting the expansion of the transfer dictionary. The expansion of the dictionary information is critical to improving the machine translation system but requires much human efforts. The developed tool can be useful for continuously expanding the transfer dictionary, and so it is expected to contribute to enhancing the translation quality.