• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.129-150
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• 2009

This paper attempts to examine the effect of children's English stories on the development of Korean EFL primary school learners' listening and speaking competences and their motivation to learn English. This paper also discusses factors of English children's stories that make EFL learners' language learning efficient. Participants were 120 primary school students who attend one of the elementary schools in Chungnam province. They were randomly chosen and divided into two groups: experimental and control groups. In order to collect data, students' listening and speaking proficiency pre- and post-tests and the pre- and post-questionnaires regarding the participants' motivation to learn English were administered. The data were analyzed by ANOVA. The results indicate that the application of English children's stories to EFL learning settings can be an efficient way to improve EFL learners' listening and speaking competences and motivation to learn their target language. The findings of this study suggest that English children's stories provide language learners with interest, meaningful and authentic contexts and enjoyment. The pedagogical suggestion and implications are provided for EFL educators and teachers.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.31-68
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• 2006

The present research investigates the acquisition of the English locative alternation by Korean EFL learners, which poses a learnability paradox, taking Pinker's framework of learnability theory as its basis. It addresses two questions (1) how lexical knowledge is represented initially and at different levels of interlanguage development and (2) what kinds of difficulty Korean learners find in the acquisition of English locative verbs and their constructions. Three groups of learners at different proficiency levels with a control group of English native speakers are examined by two instruments: elicited production task and grammaticality judgment task. According to different levels of proficiency, the learners exhibit gradual sensitivity to a change-of-state meaning and obtain complete perception of the meanings of locative verbs (manner-of-motion and change-of-state) and their constructions. Overgeneralization errors are observed in their performance. The errors are due to misinterpretations of particular lexical items in conjunction with the universal linking rules. More fundamental cause of difficulty is accounted for by partial use of learning mechanisms, caused by insufficient L2 input.

• Research in Mathematical Education
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.39-49
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• 2016

The History of Mathematics (HOM) was integrated in teaching the Cartesian Coordinate Plane (CCP) to Grade Seven learners of Moonwalk National High School using Lesson Study. After the lesson was taught, there were three valuable issues emerged: (1) HOM is a Springboard and/or a Medium of Motivation in Teaching CCP; (2) The History of CCP Opened a Wider Perspective about Its Real-life Application in the Modern World (3) Integration of History Developed a Sense of Purpose and an Appreciation of Mathematics Among Learners. Feedbacks solicited from the learners showed that they have understanding of the importance of studying Mathematics after they learned the life and contributions of Rene Descartes to Mathematics. Hence, integration of history plays a vital role in developing positive attitudes among learners towards Math.

• Research in Mathematical Education
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.21-29
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• 2016

Metacognition means "thinking about one's own thinking". There are generally two aspects of metacognition: i) Reflection - thinking about what we know; and ii) Self-regulation - managing how we go about learning. Developing metacognitive abilities is not simply about becoming reflective learners, but about acquiring specific learning strategies as well. There are several strategies that may be used by teachers to develop metacognitive skills amongst learners. As part of a Professional Development project secondary school mathematics teachers have been developing their knowledge and skills to teach for metacognition. In this paper we analyze two lessons presented by groups of teachers in the project and tease out similarities and differences between the lessons that afford or hinder the development of metacognitive skills of learners.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.375-393
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• 2011

Many aspects of e-러닝 and m-러닝 have been conducted in language learning settings while few studies have examined learners'psychological attitudes in both Internet-based languages learning environment. Althoughe-Learning and m-Learningin the content of language learningshares many common aspects, the study that particularly examinesEnglish learners' psychological attitudes from both learning environments has not been conducted. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate group difference between e-러닝 and m-러닝 in terms of characteristics of both learning environments, including Contextual Offer, Interactivity, Enjoyment, Usefulness, Easiness, Variety, Connectivity, Satisfaction, and Learning Performance. Results showed that even if there was little difference within and among groups in English learners' feelings, learners have different attitude on Enjoyment, Easiness, and Connectivity.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.67-70
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• 2006

Prosody can be used to resolve syntactic ambiguity of a sentence. English relative clause construction with complex NP(the N1, N2, and RC sequence) has syntactic ambiguity and the clause can be interpreted as modyfying N1(high attachment) or N2(low attachment), Speakers and listeners can disambiguate those sentences based on the prosody. In this paper, we investigate the Korean English learners production on the prosodic structure of English relative clause construction. The production experiment shows that the beginner learners use the phrasing frequently and the advanced learners depend on both the phrasing and the accent. One of the characteristic of the Korean English learners' intonation is that the Korean accentual phrase tone pattern LHa is transferred to their production.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.101-108
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• 2014

This study investigates the effects of Japanese learners' Korean segmental production on pronunciation evaluation by Korean native raters. Read speech from 24 learners whose native language is Japanese are transcribed at the phonemic level, and confusion matrices are generated based on the phonemic transcriptions. The deviance from the canonical pronunciation found in the learners' speech is analyzed in terms of phoneme substitutions, vowel insertions, and consonant deletions. Each learner's pronunciation is rated impressionistically by 5 Korean native raters. The result shows that the deviance from the canonical pronunciation is strongly correlated with the pronunciation evaluation scores. Especially, the rates of phoneme substitutions and vowel insertions which are very strongly correlated with the pronunciation evaluation scores.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.65-70
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• 2009

This paper describes ongoing work on the correction of adverb errors committed by Korean learners studying English as a foreign language (EFL), using an automated English writing assessment system. Adverb errors are commonly found in learners 'writings, but handling those errors rarely draws an attention in natural language processing due to complicated characteristics of adverb. To correctly detect the errors, adverbs are classified according to their grammatical functions, meanings and positions within a sentence. Adverb errors are collected from learners' sentences, and classified into five categories adopting a traditional error analysis. The error classification in conjunction with the adverb categorization is implemented into a set of mal-rules which automatically identifies the errors. When an error is detected, the system corrects the error and suggests error specific feedback. The feedback includes the types of errors, a corrected string of the error and a brief description of the error. This attempt suggests how to improve adverb error correction method as well as to provide richer diagnostic feedback to the learners.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.91-108
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• 2007

This study investigates learners' perception on their engagement in rating activities in the EFL essay-writing context. The current study aims to address the answers to the following research questions: 1) What attitude do students show about their participation in the rating tasks? and 2) which of three aspects (e.g. the degree of rating experience, the exposure to English composition instruction and learning, and proficiency level) significantly influences learners' rating activities? 104 EFL learners participated in the rater training session. After participants finished rater training session, they rated three sample essays and peer essays using the given scoring guide. Based on the analysis of survey responses that students made, students showed positive attitude toward their engagement in rating tasks. For research question 2, only L2 writing proficiency seriously affected students' perception on the rating tasks. Advanced level of subjects did not feel stressed by a grade of peers as low level of subjects did. They were also critical about the benefits of self- and peer-assessment, suggesting that a peer's feedback on their own essay was not so useful and that a self-rating does not fully help learners identify their writing proficiency.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.135-148
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• 2005

This paper investigated the effect of audio and visual cues on Korean and Japanese EFL learners' perception of the lateral/retroflex contrast in English. In a perception experiment, the two English consonants /l/ and /r/ were embedded in initial and medial position in nonsense words in the context of the vowels /i, a, u/. Singletons and clusters were included in the speech material. Audio and video recordings were made using a total of 108 items. The items were presented to Korean and Japanese learners of English in three conditions: audio-alone (A), visual-alone (V) and audio-visual presentation (AV). The results showed that there was no evidence of AV benefit for the perception of the /l/-/r/ contrast for either Korean or Japanese learners of English. Korean listeners showed much better identification rates of the /l/-/r/ contrast than Japanese listeners when presented in audio or audio-visual conditions.