• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.475-484
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• 2017

The aim of this research is the development and evaluation of a technical vocabulary list for early childhood education. The list was compiled from a corpus of 500,000 running words of written academic texts from 7 books about early childhood education. The distribution of GSL[1] and AWL[2] was 81.86% and 9.78% respectively, which meant that academic texts related to early childhood education is very similar with ones on other disciplines. The technical vocabulary list for early childhood education (TV4ECE), extracted in terms of frequency and range, contains 224 types. This word list can be used to teach early childhood education in English, especially for the preparation of reading the English texts in the field of early childhood education.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.139-157
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• 2006

As the Communicative Approach has become the norm in foreign language teaching, the objectives of teaching English in school have changed radically in Korea. The focus in high school English textbooks has shifted from mere mastery of structures to communicative proficiency. This paper will study five polysemous words which appear in twelve high school English textbooks used in Korea. The twelve text books are incorporated into a single corpus and analyzed to classify the usage of the selected words. Then the usage of each word was compared with that of three other corpora based sources: the BNC(British National Corpus) Sampler, ICE Singapore(International Corpus of English for Singapore) and Collins COBUILD learner's dictionary which is based on the corpus, "The Bank of English". The comparisons carried out as part of this study will demonstrate that Korean text books do not always supply the full range of meanings of polysemous words.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.1-10
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• 2022

The advancement of Internet technologies has provided a new and effective way to cultivate international talents. To investigate the effect of native English teachers' online synchronous classes on Chinese primary school students' oral English improvement, an 18-month quasi-experimental study was conducted on 300 primary school students in China. The experiment and control groups were provided biweekly synchronous online classes with native and non-native English teachers. SPSS was used to conduct Paired Sample T-Tests and analyze performance differentials. The results showed that online classes taught by native English teachers perform better than non-native English teachers in three areas: vocabulary accuracy, average sentence length, and phonological intonation.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.699-710
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• 2007

The study purposes to explore the effects of individual characteristics and home environments of children on their bilingual language aquisition, that is, to examine whether their English language competency is different from their Korean language competency depending on those variables. Thus English or Korean language competency of children who had had early exposure in English learning were studied in terms of child's individual characteristics such as age, gender, exposure period to English, intelligence, and experiences of visiting English-speaking countries, and home environments such as parental age, educational level, income level, their perceived English competency, their perceived significance of English and Korean language, and the frequency of using English at home. 72 children who went to English kindergarten were tested with Peabody Pictures Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) in Korean version and in English version respectively. The results show that child's intelligence and experiences of visiting English-speaking countries influence their Korean language competency. Also child's age, exposure period to English and experiences of visiting English-speaking countries influence their English language competency. Moreover their mother's educational background, father's English fluency, mothers' English fluency, and the frequency of using English at home influence child's English language competency, whereas any variables did not influence child's Korean language competency. Accordingly, child's English and Korean language competencies are related to each other.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.27-56
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• 2011

The analysis on the use of lexical discovery and consolidation strategies that have been researched within the area of vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) have not sufficiently drawn the interest of EFL practitioners with regard to vocational high school learners. The results, however, are expected to have implications for the design of vocabulary tasks and instructional materials for EFL learners. The present study investigates EFL vocational high school learners' use of lexical discovery and consolidation strategies with questionnaires, where the use of the learners' lexical discovery strategies were further validated with the think-aloud methodology by asking samples of proficient and less proficient learners to report on their reading process while reading L2 texts that had not been exposed to the learners. The results indicated that there were significant differences between the two groups of learners in the employment of 11 of the strategies which were in the categories of determination, social, memory, and metacognitive strategies, but not for cognitive strategies. The pattern of strategies indicated that different lexical discovery and consolidation strategies were employed relatively more by one proficiency group than another. The study suggests some implications for how strategy-based instruction can be implemented in EFL classrooms.

• 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.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.197-225
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to compare the difference in the interactions between beginning language learners and heritage learners on their forms based on the interaction hypothesis. In this study, three types of information gap activities were used to analyze Language Related Episodes (LREs) while investigating the interaction patterns in language use between four pairs (eight learners) of foreign learners and four pairs (eight learners) of English-speaking heritage learners. The result indicated that foreign learners had a high focus on form during interaction. In particular, they had a tendency to focus on vocabulary rather than grammar, and they conducted self-repair by examining and mostly adjusting their speech to postposition and tense. However, in the problem-solving process, they showed a limited ability in interaction, and thus directly asked others to settle the problem or resorted to using English due to their lack of ability to employ various communication strategies. However, heritage learners had a relatively low focus on form compared to foreign learners. Yet, they also focused more on vocabulary rather than grammar and conducted self-repair in interaction, especially for vocabulary. In addition, they were skillful at using various communication strategies such as indirect expressions, use of alternative words, evasion, and delaying, to expand speech and prevent communication breakdown. They focused less on grammar and mostly did not provide negative feedback in interaction.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.26.1-26.3
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• 2021

Previous approaches to create a controlled vocabulary for Japanese have resorted to existing bilingual dictionary and transformation rules to allow such mappings. However, given the possible new terms introduced due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the emphasis on respiratory and infection-related terms, coverage might not be guaranteed. We propose creating a Japanese bilingual controlled vocabulary based on MeSH terms assigned to COVID-19 related publications in this work. For such, we resorted to manual curation of several bilingual dictionaries and a computational approach based on machine translation of sentences containing such terms and the ranking of possible translations for the individual terms by mutual information. Our results show that we achieved nearly 99% occurrence coverage in LitCovid, while our computational approach presented average accuracy of 63.33% for all terms, and 84.51% for drugs and chemicals.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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• 2003.09a
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• pp.508-512
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• 2003

In 2000, the economy of Asia made a V-character type recovery from the currency and financial crisis in 1997. The increase in exports is assumed to be one of the causes. To negotiate with foreign countries, English must be indispensable in many cases. In this study, we investigated how English education is performed in East Asian countries while focusing on English textbooks. We metrically analyzed some textbooks used junior high schools and high school in Japan and Korea, and elementary schools in China and Singapore to compare them with U.S.A and U.K textbook. We investigated some characteristics of character-and word-appearance of English textbook using an exponential function. Moreover we derived the degree of difficulty far each material through the variety of words and their frequency on the basis of the required English vocabulary in Japanese junior high schools. As a result we could show at which level of U.S.A. or U.K the English textbooks used in East Asian countries are.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.177-196
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• 2003

The purpose of this study is to help teachers and program developers develop comprehensive and authentic assessment models with appropriate ways of using various kinds of assessment tools in college English instruction and assessment. Assessing by traditional discrete tests based on grammar and vocabulary cannot measure the authentic ability for language use in meaningful context in the real world. Currently, the trend in language assessment is changing to performance assessment. Increased use of performance assessments that involve language students in selecting and reflecting on their learning means that language teachers will have a wider range of evidence on which to judge whether students are becoming purposeful and are able to communicate as English users. Also, language programs focused on performance assessment are likely to instil in students authentic skills related to communication in the global world and enable them to evaluate what they learn from their English classes. In this study, the author investigated the theoretical background, the need of change, and several types of performance assessment.