• Title/Summary/Keyword: Language proficiency

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Research on Media Search and Improvement Plan for Strengthening University Competitiveness (대학 경쟁력 강화를 위한 매체 탐색과 개선 방안에 관한 연구)

  • Lee, Kyeong-Rak;Lee, Sang-Joon
    • Journal of Digital Contents Society
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    • v.18 no.6
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    • pp.1067-1078
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    • 2017
  • Previous research on university life of Chinese students studying in Korea has been conducted on students in Korea, but Chinese students have a sense of belonging and university prejudice against Korean universities, so the objectivity of research is not clear. This paper conducted a survey of the Chinese people in China and conducted a media search for attracting foreign students. Not all foreign students are proficient in Korean language. Even students who have completed more than one year of education in the Korean language institutes or passed advanced level of Test of Proficiency in Korean(TOPIK) have difficulties in everyday life and acquiring a degree. According to the results of this study, until foreign students who lack sufficient Korean language skills are able to adapt to culture and acquire information in Korea, it is desirable to prepare multilingual content services so that they can obtain academic information or daily information necessary for studying in their native language.

Considerations Regarding the Application of IMO Maritime English Model Course 3.17 in Korean Contexts

  • Choi, Seung-Hee;Park, Jin-Soo
    • Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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    • v.40 no.5
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    • pp.299-304
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    • 2016
  • The importance of clear and effective communication at sea has been greatly emphasized due to the increase in multiculturalism on board both ocean-going and coastal vessels, and the necessity of systematic English training based on 'Knowledge, Understanding, and Proficiency' specified in STCW has also been recognized. With these growing needs in mind, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) updated the Maritime English (ME) Model Course 3.17 in 2015 by providing guidelines on language education within two separate categories, General Maritime English (GME) and Specialized Maritime English (SME). The IMO is now attempting to create a new, global framework of ME education and training, and this this new course model must first be thoroughly understood in order to explore the ways to apply the modified version into the context of current ME education in Korea and to design an updated language curriculum. Therefore, the general structural features of the new model course will be explained in this paper, and the course focus set by IMO and to be considered and/or adopted by the Republic of Korea will be closely examined. Finally, suggestions will be made on how to implement this revised model course in practice with the following focus: the development of localized curriculum for GME and SME; the provision of practical teaching guidance through relevant online and offline materials for class and self-study; and the establishment of qualification guidelines and a teaching support system for language teachers in maritime and language education.

Pronoun Resolution in French Discourse by Korean-learners of French (한국인 프랑스어 학습자의 프랑스어 담화 이해와 대명사 해석 연구)

  • Ahn, Eui-Jeen;Song, Hyun-Joo;Kim, Min-Ju;Leem, Jai-Ho
    • Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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    • v.25 no.4
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    • pp.417-433
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    • 2014
  • This research examined whether Korean-learners of French were sensitive to discourse structure in anaphoric pronoun resolution. In the experiments, participants read three-sentenced stories and made judgements about how the last sentence of each story makes sense in relation to previous two sentences on a 7-point Likert scale. The stories differed in whether the subject of the last sentence continued the subject of the preceding sentence, and whether the subject of the last sentence was mentioned with a pronoun or a proper noun. The results from French participants replicated the patterns shown in previous studies. In contrast, Koreans exhibited greater difficulty in interpreting pronoun-subject sentences than noun-subject sentences regardless of subject continuity. These findings are discussed within the context of developmental perspective, which suggests the processing of co-referential interpretation may interact with language proficiency.

Life Satisfaction and Consumer Satisfaction of Resident Foreigners in Korea (국내거주외국인의 생활만족도와 소비생활만족도에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Hyun-Joo;Rha, Jong-Youn
    • Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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    • v.46 no.10
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    • pp.133-146
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    • 2008
  • This study investgates the factors influencing the levels of consumer satisfaction and life satisfaction of resident foreigners in Korea. The data were collected through a structured self-administered survey and 545 foreigners who lived in Korea for more than 3 months, with age over 20 participated as respondents. A research framework was formulated based on the resource constraint hypothesis and the study investigated the impact of information resource(human, media and internet information source) and consumer resource(monthly income, language ability and consumer proficiency) on the levels of consumer satisfaction and life satisfaction. The results from data analysis can be summarized as follows; First, analysis of consumer problems of resident foreigners in Korea indicated that resident foreigners recognize a burden for residence cost, food expense and education fee. Most of resident foreigners in Korea are found to use small local shops most often indicating they may experience adverse market environment due to resource constraint such as language or psychological barrier, and most of the respondents answered that the most often used payment method was cash. Furthermore, resident foreigners in Korea responded that lack of language service, lack of information provision, inability to use certain goods and services are the common cause of consumer dissatisfaction, as well as price and quality problems. Second, the level of consumer satisfaction (2.96 in 4.0) is higher than the level of life satisfaction (2.63 in 4.0). Third, the level of life satisfaction is significantly influenced by Korean language ability and the level of consumer satisfaction. The level of consumer satisfaction is by the media information source usage and consumer claim experience. Fourth, the level of consumer satisfaction is found to be the variable with the strongest causal relationship with the level of life satisfaction.

A Study on Cultural Identities of Jewish Immigrants from Former Soviet Union in Israel : Focused on the Language Use and Acceptance of Religion of the Newcomers who immigrated during the 1990s (이스라엘의 구소련 유대인 이주자들의 문화정체성 연구 - 1990년대 이주한 뉴커머들의 언어 사용과 종교 수용을 중심으로)

  • Choi, A-Young
    • Cross-Cultural Studies
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    • v.38
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    • pp.297-329
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    • 2015
  • Since 1989 about one million Jews from Former Soviet Union have immigrated to Israel. Now Russian speaking Jews are the second largest ethnic groups after the Israeli Jews who were born in Israel. Although FSU Jews have returned to their ethnic homeland, they continue to live as 'foreigners' due to a cultural distance between sending and receiving society, such as, lack of knowledge about Jewish tradition and religious practice and low level of Hebrew proficiency. Because of this reason FSU immigrants tend to continue remain strong ties with Russian language and culture. There are several reasons for such a relatively slow process of language shift of FSU Jewish immigrants, the language shift to Hebrew. Firstly, majority of FSU immigrants moved to Israel since the 1990s are older than 45. Secondly, their first residences in Israel are mostly located in small and mid-sized cities, where the proportion of Russian speaking immigrants is more than 30%. And finally they consider Russian culture is 'superior' to Israel's Levantine culture. For many Jewish diasporic communities, Judaism was a dominant factor for self-consciousness, but because of Soviet regime, aimed to break all the religious institution including Jewish, Soviet Jewry was uprooted from their religious traditions. Besides about 30% of FSU immigrants are not defined as Jews by the Jewish religious law(Halakhah). And many of them are reluctant to convert to Judaism. FSU Jewish immigrant agree that Israel must be a Jewish state, but for them 'Jewish' does not include religious elements. FSU immigrants consider that religious affiliation of citizens of Israel should not affect their civic rights.

Factors related to English communication skills in the dental health service process of clinical dental hygienists (임상 치과위생사의 치과의료 서비스 과정에서 영어 의사소통 능력 관련 요인)

  • Park, Myeong-Hwa;Park, Jong-Tae;Jang, Jong-Hwa
    • Journal of Korean society of Dental Hygiene
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    • v.22 no.5
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    • pp.375-382
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    • 2022
  • Objectives: This study analyzes factors related to English communication skills in the dental health services of clinical dental hygienists who provide dental medical services to foreigners. Methods: Surveys were conducted to measure students' English communication skills. Participants comprised 195 clinical dental hygienists working at dental English study cafes or who provided dental medical services to foreigners. After analyzing the differences in English communication skills, hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed on the factors related to English communication skills. Results: English communication skill of dental hygienists was 1.96 points out of 5 points. The factors related to the English communication skill of the clinical dental hygienists were foreign patient care, language training experience, overseas living experience, and certified English proficiency. The adjusted explanatory power of this model was 53.0%. Conclusions: Dental hygienists in charge of foreign patients have experience in language training and overseas residence, have a language qualification certificate, and have higher English communication skills. It is necessary to develop English language learning programs based on metaverse to develop the English communication skills of dental hygienists who provide dental health services to foreign patients and to operate a creative educational environment to increase interest in learning English.

The Effects of Teaching University Mathematics in English (대학 수학 교육에서 영어 강의의 효과 연구)

  • Lee, Hae-Moon;Kim, Young-Wook
    • Journal for History of Mathematics
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    • v.20 no.1
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    • pp.83-102
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    • 2007
  • A math class in Korean university was taught in English for one semester and the students' improvement was measured in math content and English proficiency. Pre and post test in 9 week intervals showed that math content loaming in the immersion class was superior to the non-immersed class. Especially, the immersion class showed remarkable improvement in difficult problems among math content test problems. The immersion class improved in math-related English, but not in general English. It is discussed that the particular English expressions for math are hardly separable from the math content knowledge in English because understanding and using those expressions correctly means the students' understanding of math concept in English and thus the math concept itself.

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Quantifying L2ers' phraseological competence and text quality in L2 English writing (L2 영어 학습자들의 연어 사용 능숙도와 텍스트 질 사이의 수치화)

  • Kwon, Junhyeok;Kim, Jaejun;Kim, Yoolae;Park, Myung-Kwan;Song, Sanghoun
    • 한국어정보학회:학술대회논문집
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    • 2017.10a
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    • pp.281-284
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    • 2017
  • On the basis of studies that show multi-word combinations, that is the field of phraseology, this study aims to examine relationship between the quality of text and phraseological competence in L2 English writing, following Yves Bestegen et al. (2014). Using two different association scores, t-score and Mutual Information(MI), which are opposite ways of measuring phraseological competence, in terms of scoring frequency and infrequency, bigrams from L2 writers' text scored based on a reference corpus, GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web based English). On a cross-sectional approach, we propose that the quality of the essays and the mean MI score of the bigram extracted from YELC, Yonsei English Learner Corpus, correlated to each other. The negative scores of bigrams are also correlated with the quality of the essays in the way that these bigrams are absent from the reference corpus, that is mostly ungrammatical. It indicates that increase in the proportion of the negative scored bigrams debases the quality of essays. The conclusion shows the quality of the essays scored by MI and t-score on cross-sectional approach, and application to teaching method and assessment for second language writing proficiency.

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A Corpus-based Analysis of EFL Learners' Use of Hedges in Cross-cultural Communication

  • Min, Su-Jung
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.16 no.4
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    • pp.91-106
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    • 2010
  • This study examines the use of hedges in cross-cultural communication between EFL learners in an e-learning environment. The study analyzes the use of hedges in a corpus of 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. It compares the use of hedges in the students' corpus to that of a native English speakers' corpus. The result shows that EFL learners tend to use relatively smaller number of hedges than the native speakers in terms of the frequencies of the total tokens. It further reveals that the learners' overuse of a single versatile high-frequency hedging item, I think, results in relative underuse of other hedging devices. This indicates that due to their small repertoire of hedges, EFL learners' overuse of a limited number of hedging items may cause their speech or writing to become less competent. Based on the result and interviews with the learners, the study also argues that hedging should be understood in its social contexts and should not be understood just as a lack of conviction or a mark of low proficiency. Suggestions were made for using computer corpora in understanding EFL learners' language difficulties and helping them develop communicative and pragmatic competence.

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An Acoustical Analysis of English Stops at the Initial and After-initial-/s/ Positions by Korean and American Speakers (한국인과 미국인의 초성 및 초성 /s/ 다음에 오는 영어 파열음 음향 분석)

  • Yang, Byunggon
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.5 no.3
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    • pp.11-20
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    • 2013
  • The purpose of this study is to compare the acoustic parameters of English stop consonants at the initial and after-initial-/s/ positions in a message produced by 47 Korean and American speakers in order to provide better pronunciation skills of English stops for Korean learners. A Praat script was developed to obtain voice onset time (VOT), maximum consonant intensity (maxCi), and rate of rise (ROR) from six target words with stops at the positions in the message. Results show that VOT and maxCi were significantly different between the two language groups while ROR wasn't. The Korean speakers generally produced the stop consonants with longer VOTs and higher consonant intensity. From the comparison of consonant groups at the two different positions, the Korean participants did not distinguish them as clearly as the American participants did at the after-initial-/s/ position. Finally a comparison of each language and sex group revealed that the major difference was attributed to stop consonants in the after-/s/ position. The author concluded that Korean speakers should be careful not to produce all the stops with longer VOTs and higher intensity. Further studies would be desirable to examine how Americans evaluate Korean speakers' English proficiency with modified acoustic values of English stops.