• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.368-379
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• 2022

This study aims to understand the characteristics of Korean language learners and propose appropriate teaching plans for them through a focus group interview with Korean language instructors who had experience in teaching Korean at university-attached institutions in Hong Kong. For this purpose, the investigator interviewed ten instructors who taught Korean for at least five years. Korean language learners in Hong Kong who were in their twenties, but there were diverse age groups, including those in their fifties or older. Their motivations for learning Korean included the Korean Wave and the influence of support from the Continuing Education Fund by the Hong Kong government. Korean language learners in Hong Kong were characterized by active learning desire and effort, continuous learning intention, passive performance in speaking, and sensitivity to the disclosure of private information. Based on these findings, the study proposes to devise teaching and learning methods based on various age groups in a class and teaching methods for speaking that reflect the characteristics of Korean language learners in Hong Kong to teach Korean more effectively. The study is significant as a field study that examines the learning motivations, learning attitudes, and difficulties with Korean study of Korean language learners based on an unprecedented survey of the characteristics of common local Korean learners in Hong Kong.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.621-630
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• 2018

This paper presents a case study on foreign language learning applications based on the speech recognition technology, aiming to grasp their current status and limitations of the technology applied to the foreign language speaking education, especially for English and French. As a result of examining the characteristics of the selected English and French applications by drawing on speech learning, it is shown that the use of speech recognition technology has the advantage of creating a speaking practice environment and giving feedback. However, in the case of feedback, there is a lack of appropriate calibration feedback which can help learners correct errors by themselves.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.53-61
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• 2012

Kodu made by MS is a new 3D visual programming language made specifically for creating games. This language is based on creativity, problem-solving methods, and storytelling. So, it is very suitable for game programming education for kids. In this paper, we designed learning method to develop games based on elementary school students' creative thinking. The instruction was given to 27 6-grade elementary school students in 30 hours. And we applied the learning method in class. Also, we analyzed the changes in the learners' creative thinking and the learning effects of game programming.

• Journal of Fisheries and Marine Sciences Education
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.523-542
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to figure out the procedure of learning Korean for international students. A research question was set up as follows: What is the procedure of leaning Korean for international students in Korean universities? To achieve the research purpose, this study implemented a method of semi-constructed interviews. Nineteen international students participated in the interview. The collected data for this study included transcripts from each interview. The transcripts of 60 minutes of interviews with all the participants was audio-taped recorded. This study investigated the research question based on the grounded theory. The analysis of open coding, axial-coding, and selective coding was used in the study. Results indicated that international students learned Korean in a daily basis, and then they adapted to academic Korean in their majored fields. Both personality and mother tongue influenced Korean language learning positively and negatively. International students' improvement of Korean was related in studying with Korean mass media such as TV soap dramas, talk shows, and songs. International students think that TOPIK(Test Of Proficiency In Korean) is not much related with their Korean language fluency. In conclusion, the researchers suggested to give more emphasis on academic training courses for Korean language and to improve the TOPIK in general academic Korean.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.177-184
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• 2017

The purpose of this study was to explore children and robot interaction in distant language learning environments using three different video-conferencing technologies-two traditional screen-based videoconference technologies and a telepresence robot. One American and six Korean elementary school students participated in our case study. We relied on narratives of one-on-one interviews and observation of nonverbal cues in robot assisted language learning. Our findings suggest that participants responded more positively to interactions via a telepresence robot than to two screen-based video-conferencings, with many citing a stronger sense of immediacy during robot-mediated communications.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.1-8
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• 2019

Dialog system is becoming a new dominant interaction way between human and computer. It allows people to be provided with various services through natural language. The dialog system has a common structure of a pipeline consisting of several modules (e.g., speech recognition, natural language understanding, and dialog management). In this paper, we tackle a task of domain classification for the natural language understanding module by employing machine learning models such as convolutional neural network and random forest. For our dataset of seven service domains, we showed that the random forest model achieved the best performance (F1 score 0.97). As a future work, we will keep finding a better approach for domain classification by investigating other machine learning models.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.12 no.10
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• pp.27-35
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• 2021

Automatic post editing is a research field that aims to automatically correct errors in machine translation results. This research is mainly being focus on high resource language pairs, such as English-German. Recent APE studies are mainly adopting transfer learning based research, where pre-training language models, or translation models generated through self-supervised learning methodologies are utilized. While translation based APE model shows superior performance in recent researches, as such researches are conducted on the high resource languages, the same perspective cannot be directly applied to the low resource languages. In this work, we apply two transfer learning strategies to Korean-English APE studies and show that transfer learning with translation model can significantly improves APE performance.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.165-196
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• 2018

This study examined the language acquisition of children from Chinese families in Korea under the bilingual background of Korean and Chinese, focusing on pronunciation and vocabulary. First, in the analysis of pronunciation acquisition, children correctly realized the lenition, aspirated sound, glottalization, palatalization, nasalization, and liquidization while the realization of pronunciation rules for unfamiliar words was low. There were also errors caused when the application principles of pronunciation were not accurately understood or they were not partially acquired. Second, in the analysis of vocabulary acquisition, the acquisition of receptive vocabulary was in the order of verb, noun, and adjective while they clearly understood vocabulary used in the actual relationships with school, family, and peers. In the acquisition of productive vocabulary, they showed the 'meaning-centered principle' of learning the meaning of vocabulary first and then learning its form afterwards. The amount of study and exposure to Korean language had effects on the improvement of vocabulary. Even though this study focused on the errors and characteristics in the acquisition process of Korean pronunciation and vocabulary for children from Chinese families in Korea, it could not clearly find out which one would have greater effects on the acquisition of Korean language. However, lots of exchanges and experiences with surrounding environment and peer group had great effects on the language acquisition and language acquisition transfer of children.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.189-215
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• 2008

This study proposes using children's literature as a means of teaching and learning English as a foreign language and suggests practical strategies on the basis of transactional theory of reading suggested by Rosenblatt (1994, 1995). This study suggests three novels written for children or young adults: On My Honor (1986) by Marion Dane Bauer, The Giver (1993) by Lois Lowry and Hatchet (1987) by Gary Paulsen. These texts were selected because of their diverse topics, easy and comprehensible language, engaging stories, and authentic and rich expressions, making them effective materials for foreign language learners. This paper is organized as follows: First, it reviews research on teaching literature in English education and response-oriented language teaching to provide theoretical background of literature-based language teaching and learning. Second, it provides the background of the texts selected for the study. Third, it develops diverse, practical strategies for instructors who intend to use children's literature in EFL teaching. We expect to guide EFL instructors in adopting children's literature in their English class by connecting theory and practice and by providing diverse methods and strategies, and sample responses by EFL university students.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.57-76
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• 2005

This study provides a rationale for using project-based learning with Korean students of English in Korea; in addition, it describes the process of creating and implementing project-based learning in the classroom and gives examples of how this unique teaching and learning method has been used successfully to teach learners with different levels of English proficiency. The first two chapters of the study examine the nature of project-based learning by comparing it with related fields of study, such as language teaching syllabi and methods, cognitive psychology, constructivists' views and interaction theory. The latter part of the study deals with issues related to applying project-based learning in Korean English classes. It emphasizes the importance not only of motivating active group effort and participation, but also in creating a trusting, cooperative relationship between group members in order to have a successful accomplishment of a project. The study concludes with implications for future studies.