• Title/Summary/Keyword: Korean EFL college students

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Non-native/Non-native Interactions: Meaning Negotiation by EFL College Students

  • Suh, Jae-Suk
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.16 no.3
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    • pp.119-139
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    • 2010
  • The purpose of this paper was to examine various aspects of meaning negotiation process in online chatting. Korean college students were asked to engage in chatting on the Internet over the course of a semester-long period, and chatting transcripts were analyzed in terms of sources of communication breakdown, signals to indicate communication breakdown, strategies to overcome communication breakdown, and ways of closing meaning negotiation. According to the findings of the study, lack of background knowledge and incoherent string of sentences in text were two major barriers creating communication problems. Subjects were able to use signals to indicate their communication difficulties, and overcome them by using different strategies. In doing so, however, they were found to suffer a narrow range of signals and strategies, which showed their limited communicative ability in the management of interaction, and indicated a clear, strong need for an extension of discourse and strategic competences of Korean students for more effective and smoother transition of message in everyday interaction.

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Role of Self-Theories in English as a Foreign Language: A Comparison between Korean and Pakistani Students (EFL 학습자의 자기이론: 한국과 파키스탄 비교연구)

  • Aziz, Mudassar;Shin, Tae-Seob
    • Korean Journal of Comparative Education
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    • v.23 no.5
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    • pp.1-18
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    • 2013
  • Self-theories regarding general intelligence and English ability were measured from two countries (Korea and Pakistan) and their relationships with self-reported overall academic achievement and English language achievement were examined. No significant mean differences between the two countries were found regarding college students' self-theories. There were significant mean differences in overall academic achievement and English achievement between the two countries. Both the overall academic achievement and English achievement were significantly correlated with various self-theories while taking both samples together. Achievement measures were predicted by self-theories of general intelligence and English language ability. The current study highlighted the relationship between self-theories about general intelligence and English language ability and their relationship with self-reported achievement in two cultural contexts. This research also introduced new instruments to measure self-theories that can be used in studying self-theories in different domains.

A Study on the Korean EFL Learners' Grammatical Knowledge Development under Input-enhanced FFI and Output-enhanced FFI Conditions (입력강화와 출력강화 형태초점교수 상황에서의 한국 EFL 학습자들의 언어형태 지식개발에 관한 연구)

  • Hwang, Hee-Jeong
    • Journal of Digital Convergence
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    • v.16 no.5
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    • pp.435-443
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    • 2018
  • This study explores the effects of different Focus-on-Form Instruction (FFI) on improving learners' grammatical knowledge development and observes how the learners apply the knowledge to their output. A total of 112 college students were placed into three groups: 35 input-enhanced group students, who received visually enhanced input reading materials, 41 output-enhanced group students, performing dictogloss tasks, and 46 control group students given traditional grammar instruction. All the participant students took pre/post grammatical tests and completed pre/post writing tasks, which aimed to look into how the target grammatical structures were used in writing. The research findings indicated that both input-enhanced and output-enhanced FFI were effective on learners' language form learning and made contribution to their writing. Based on the findings, this study suggests that the elaborate design of combination of both FFI can maximize learners' language form learning.

EFL College Students' Perceptions toward the Use of Electronic Dictionaries

  • Park, Mae-Ran
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.12 no.1
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    • pp.29-54
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    • 2006
  • The purpose of this study is two-fold: first, to examine the current status of e-dictionary use in Korea and the attitude toward its use by Korean college students; second, to investigate to what degree e-dictionaries may be useful and effective tools in helping to improve learners' overall English skills. The subjects were 84 college students and they were divided into two groups: the experiment group and the control group. The instrument employed was the Preliminary Student Usage Questionnaire, which was developed by the researcher, together with the questionnaire survey developed by Koyama and Takeuchi (2004), which was modified for the study. The findings from this research are as follows: First, a special instruction session on how to use e-dictionaries made a statistically significant difference among users of the dictionaries. Those subjects who had received the instruction displayed a more positive attitude toward the use of e-dictionaries. Second, the experiment group showed a more favorable attitude toward the use of e-dictionaries. On the basis of the above results, the researcher suggests that proper guidance on the use of e-dictionaries and their benefits should have a positive influence on users. The findings from the current research will shed light on the current status of electronic dictionary use among Korean college students.

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The Effect of Contextual Knowledge on EFL Learners' Participation in Cross-Cultural Communication

  • Min, Su-Jung
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.15 no.2
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    • pp.209-224
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    • 2009
  • This study examined the role of contextual knowledge in cross-cultural communication between non-native speakers on an interactive web with a bulletin board system through which college students of English at Japanese and Korean universities interacted with each other discussing the topics of local and global issues. The study investigated the influence of students' relative contextual knowledge on active participation in interactions and discussed the results focusing on the use of discourse strategies for meaning negotiation. The study argues that in interactions even between non-native speakers with limited proficiency, contextual knowledge in the topic under discussion affects the degree to which they accommodate to each other during communication and suggests that the focus of teaching English as a foreign language also should be given to what kind of contextual knowledge students need to obtain and how to express it rather than what level of proficiency in English they need to acquire.

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Using Mobile Phones in EFL Classes

  • Sung, Tae-Soo;Park, Kab-Yong;Joo, Chi-Woon
    • Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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    • v.22 no.6
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    • pp.33-40
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    • 2017
  • This article is to investigate the possibility that project-based classes introducing mobile phones can replace the monotony of traditional classes led by teachers as well as they can encourage students to take active part in the classes to some extent. The students in groups choose a genre for their own video projects (e.g., movie, drama, news, documentary, and commercial) and produce the video contents using a mobile phone for presentation made at the end of a semester. In the sense that the students are allowed to do video-based mobile phone projects, they can work independently outside of class, where time and space are more flexible and students are free from the anxiety of speaking or acting in front of an audience. A mobile phone project consists of around five stages done both in and outside of the classroom. All of these stages can be graded independently, including genre selection, drafting of scripts, peer review and revision, rehearsals, and presentation of the video. Feedback is given to students. After the presentation, students filled out a survey questionnaire sheet devised to analyze students' responses toward preferences and level of difficulty of the project activity. Finally, proposals are made for introduction of a better mobile phone-based project classes.

Confusion in the Perception of English Anterior Coronal Consonants by Korean EFL Students (한국 EFL 학생들의 영어 전방 설정 자음 혼동)

  • Cho, Mi-Hui
    • The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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    • v.10 no.5
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    • pp.460-466
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    • 2010
  • It is well-known that Korean EFL learners have difficulties in producing English fricatives which are not in the inventory of Korean and consequently tend to replace English fricatives with stops. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Korean students also have difficulties perceiving English anterior coronal consonants including fricatives. To this end, forty Korean college students participated in an identification test which consisted of 24 nonce words with English anterior coronal consonants in 4 different prosodic locations (CV, VC, VCVV,VVCV). It was shown that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV, providing confusion matrices for each target consonant. It was also found that Korean participants had a great difficulty identifying English[$\theta$] and [$\eth$], which are novel in Korean. Importantly, the confusion patterns found in the perception test tended not to be identical with those found in the previous production studies in that both stops and fricatives were misperceived as fricatives while fricatives were misproduced as stops. Further, perceptual devoicing and intervocalic voicing were attested inVC and intervocalic position, respectively. Based on the findings of this study, pedagogical implications were drawn.

Some Goals and Components in Teaching English Pronunciation To Japanese EFL Students

  • Komoto, Yujin
    • Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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    • 2000.07a
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    • pp.220-234
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    • 2000
  • This paper focuses on how and where to set learner goals in English phonetic education in Japan, especially at the threshold level, and on what components are necessary to achieve them both from practical and theoretical perspectives. It first describes some issues mainly through the speaker's own teaching plan and a literature review of various researchers such as Morley (1991), Kajima (1989), Porcaro (1999), Matsul (1996), Lambacher (1995, 1996), Dalton and Seidlhofer (1994), and Murphy (1991). By comparing and analyzing these and other researchers, the speaker tries to set and elucidate reasonable and achievable goals for students to attain intelligibility for comprehensible communicative output. The paper then suggests detailed components that form an essential part of desirable pronunciation teaching plan in order to realize a well-balanced curriculum between segmental and suprasegmental aspects.

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An analysis of the theories and a case study for teaching EFL reading with the use of socioaffective strategies (사회감정전략을 이용한 영어독해수업 모형제시를 위한 이론 및 사례연구 분석)

  • Choi, Kyung-Hee
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.9 no.spc
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    • pp.185-208
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    • 2003
  • The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the theories concerning socioaffective strategies, to analyze the dialogues of the students negotiating for meaning of a reading material and to suggest some implications of socioaffective strategies for teaching reading. The examination of the theories - the interaction hypothesis and the sociocultural theory - suggest that the use of socioaffective strategies facilitates more effective understanding of information that is to be found. distributed, and taken in among the participants. The discourse analyses of the students' interaction in a Korean college English reading class show ample evidence of the use of socioaffective strategies that helped them understand the meaning of a text. However, the analyses show that the strategies are mostly used to ask questions concerning the meaning of clauses. Only few analytical questions are raised for some structural and pragmatical features in the text which are crucial to the understanding of its meaning. Imbalance also exists in the types of the questions used by the participants. The analyses indicate that, instead of negotiating more interactively, the students tend to rely upon a more advanced student when they face difficult English sentences. Therefore as a conclusion this paper emphasizes the importance of teaching socioaffective strategies to help students to help themselves to become more cooperative, independent and analytical in reading English texts.

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On Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) on English Grammar

  • Sung, Tae-Soo
    • Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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    • v.23 no.9
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    • pp.65-71
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    • 2018
  • Using mobile technology in educational and learning environments has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. In this mobile environment, mobile phones have been used to enhance the effectiveness of education in the field, which has been recognized through numerous experimental studies so far. The study was proposed and conducted to find out how much the use of mobile phones can have to improve the grammatical knowledge of EFL students. Introduction of 95 intermediate courses to Chungnam area The second grade students of 4-year college participated in this study. Everyone in the experimental and control groups was given the opportunity to review and recur to use the six grammar formats, including the current complete tense, simple past tense, direct and indirect question sentences, and comparative and superative-based methods. During the class discussion, the participants of the group record their voice on their cell phones, analyze the mistakes in the expressions recorded as a task after the class, and explain the results in the next session. However, in the class of the control group participants, this recording process is omitted. Participants benefited from mobile learning were much more positive in multidimensional grammar tests than those in control groups.