• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.1-31
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• 2009

Although Korean university students' primary concern is academic success in their higher degrees in the UK, they highly desire to develop English communicative competence through a number of opportunities to speak with natives speakers. The paper aims at examining to what extent they are able to be socialised into a new environment while they are studying at UK universities. The in-depth, longitudinal interviews with the targeted group of six Korean masters' students at the University of York was undertaken to observe the pace of their progress in developing social skills. Reluctance and hesitance to contact and interact with their supervisors and other academic staff persisted for most of them to the final term caused by cultural reasons such as face and hierarchy rather than language problems. Despite the six participants' variation in their patterns of social interaction, they struggled with pressures towards monoculture-biased interaction with Korean people, which was quite extreme for the five participants. This passivity can be explained by several reasons such as the students' lack of communicative competence and other situational factors on one-year course. It is important to note that students' failure to develop network with native speakers is strongly associated with experience of cultural withdrawal and frustration with developing communicative competence in English.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2009

This study focuses on providing the pedagogical implications of stress in English pronunciation teaching since stress is one the most important characteristic factors in English pronunciation (Bolinger, 1976; Brown, 1994; Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 1996; Kreidler, 1989). The author investigated stress production regarding in terms of duration, pitch, and intensity by a group of native speakers of English and a group of low-proficiency South Kyungsang Korean college students for their pre-test. For both of the pre- and post-test, the same stimuli, which consisted of a one-syllable word, two two-syllable words, three three-syllable words, and three four-syllable words, were used along with the various sentence positions: isolation, initial, medial, and final. Soft ware programs, ALVIN and Praat, were used to record and analyze the data. Since Celce-Murcia et al. (1996), Klatt (1975), and Ladefoged (2001) treat duration of the stressed syllable more significantly than other factors, pitch and intensity, with respect to the listener's point of view, the author developed a special method of teaching English stress using a traditional Korean drum to emphasize duration. In addition, the results from the native speakers' production showed that their main strategy to realize stress was through lengthening stressed syllables. After six weeks of stress instruction using the drum, the production of the native speakers and the SK Korean participants from the pre- and post-test were compared. The results from the post-test indicated that the participants showed great improvement not only in duration but also in pitch after the stress instruction. Pitch improvement was unexpected but well-explained by the statement that long vowels receive accent in loan word adaptation in North Kyungsang Korean. The results also showed that the Korean participants' pitch values became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex, due to their dependency upon their L1.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.4
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• pp.207-228
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• 1998

This study investigated how Korean learners of English acquired the English reflexives. There is emphasis on the effects of the GCP and PAP(Wexler and Manzini, 1987). The purpose is to examine the major hypothesis that L2 learners are still constrained by Universal Grammar (UG), despite the influence of the parameter setting of their native language as well as the non-operation of the Subset Principle. The experimental group consisted of 30 middle school students (age 14-15), 30 high school students (age 16-17), and 30 university students (age 18-19) as well as 20 ESL students (age 16) studying English in the USA. Twenty native speakers of English served as a control group. The subjects responded to a test on reflexives that used a multiple-choice grammaticality judgement task. Findings show that L2 learners transfer their L1 parameter setting and, as a result, make errors in the choice of antecedents for reflexives. Therefore, I argue that the L2 learner is still constrained by UG.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.159-166
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• 2021

The introduction of the communicative approach in the English language education brings in a Korean the English Program in Korea (EPIK), which is a Korean government sponsored program established 1995. by the Korean Ministry of Education improve Korean students' and teachers' communicative competency in English within the public school system in Korea. For this goal, EPIK invites English speakers from 7 major English-speaking countries. However, the effectiveness of this program has been questioned in Korea. Thus, the objective of this paper is to explore the current status, problems, and the directions for the program to be aimed at, and for the effectiveness of EPIK through investigation of the program. Then this paper presents some possible solutions and suggestions including the possibility of VR use in orientation and training programs in order to empower both Korean teachers of English and English native teachers in Korea.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.187-210
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• 2002

The goal of this study is to investigate the course development for the Korean students in the immersion English program. This study describes the detailed curriculum and makes some suggestions to improve the courses for regular, extracurricular, and special activities in the five-week immersion English program managed by KAIST in summer 2001. This immersion English program was designed to develop the students' communicative competence in speaking English with native speakers in the age of globalization, by providing students with the English-speaking immersion setting. The results of the students' tests and the data concerning the program revealed that the program was very significant in improving students' communicative competence focused on communication and presentation and in attaining the high motivation for the natural English communication by performing the student-centered and task-based extracurricular activities and special events.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.41-59
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• 2009

The present study investigated Korean learners' knowledge on the range of possible interpretations of English locative PPs with manner of motion verbs, and considers whether learners can arrive at a superset L2 grammar on the basis of positive L2 input. Unlike Korean, some English locative PPs occurring with manner of motion verbs (such as in John jumped on the bed) are ambiguous as they can be interpreted as either directional or locational. Thirty Korean learners of English in three distinct groups (Advanced EFL-only group; Intermediate-EFL-only group; and ESL-experienced group) participated in an experimental study, along with a control group of nine native speakers of English. The results of the study showed that I) Korean learners, overall, tended to interpret English locative PPs as only locational, failing to recognize the ambiguity between the directional and locational readings in the target structure; 2) For the learners who experienced only the EFL context, even highly proficient learners, as well as intermediate level learners, failed to acknowledge the ambiguity; 3) The learners who experienced the ESL context for an extended period of time could identify the target reading to some extent, although they still could not reach the native-like competence. From these results, it is argued that robustness of positive evidence, not simply its availability, is critical in the acquisition of the superset L2 targets like the present one.

• 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.

• 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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.53-80
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• 2011

The study examines how Koreans' politeness is realized in a speech act, request. The main focus is to explore underlying rationale and influence involved in their performance, not just the comparison of difference in politeness realization between native and nonnative speakers of English, as previous studies did. The study employs the DCT, an attached politeness scale questionnaire, and interviews. Twenty nine university students participated in the study. Interchangeable reading of the three data yields some interesting and valuable insights. The participants heavily rely on a few formulaic expressions to express politeness, such as interrogatives with modal verbs, please and excuse me as a politeness marker. They want to use honorific address terms that is literally translated into English, and have a belief that there are honorific words in English as in Korean. The study refers to the participants' voice on indirectness, nonverbal messages, and expressions with different connotations between English and Korean.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.159-175
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• 2004

This paper investigated the types of errors on English pronunciation and intelligibility of Korean EFL students, and the relationship between the pronunciation accuracy and intelligibility. Thirty one students were evaluated by six English native speakers in terms of overall intelligibility and accuracy In five areas such as nuclear stress, word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels. According to the findings of the study, pronunciation errors were made by the subjects more frequently In word stress than any other area of pronunciation accuracy. The Pearson correlation analysis showed that intelligibility was related with word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels, and the stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that, among the above five areas of pronunciation accuracy, word stress best accounted for the intelligibility of a given sentence. In the conclusion, the importance of teaching pronunciation of in those five areas with a special focus on word stress was emphasized m terms of intelligibility.