• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.119-139
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• 2011

Free-talking in Korea has recently been emphasized as a way of improving students' speaking ability outside of the classroom. The purpose of this study is to examine perceptions of free-talking, to understand what type of roles were played by or allotted between Korean students and international professors (IPs) and to look for effective speaking strategies for utilizing free-talking. Participants of this study were 68 university students and 23 IPs. The data collected through a survey type of questionnaire were analyzed by this researcher and the main findings indicate that students and IPs have somewhat different viewpoints about their concepts of free-talking. Students expressed varying viewpoints depending on their experience and class (year). In terms of the benefits, usefulness, and satisfaction of free-talking, students and IPs seem to be in more agreement with each other although the two groups have conflicting perceptions in the particular operation of free-talking, especially in terms of preparation and feedback. Students stated that they feel anxious, nervous, and that they struggle with peer pressure while free-talking. However, they feel that through free-talking they build up confidence and increase their speaking ability. Regarding roles, most professors play a helpful role as a guide or facilitator while students want professors to provide more suitable materials and to tutor them by means of appropriate feedback and strategies as well-prepared teachers like a prompter, participant or tutor in the timely manner. Finally, this paper proffers a few practical suggestions for activating free-talking and a discussion of the pedagogical implications.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.1-25
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• 2011

This research primarily aimed to investigate proficient and less proficient EFL readers' awareness and experiences about learning to read and reading in English. The secondary purpose was to explore the participants' reading strategies, and to discover how the genres of English texts influence their reading processing behaviors. The participants consisted of four college students in engineering aged 21-25 years. Three data sources were employed: questionnaires, interviews, and think-alouds. The findings revealed that: (1) the proficient EFL readers judged themselves to be good readers, while the less proficient EFL readers judged themselves to be fair readers; (2) unknown vocabulary was perceived to be the major impediment to reading comprehension; the think-aloud data, however, demonstrated that unknown vocabulary did not significantly interfere with their reading comprehension; (3) regardless of the genre of the text, the participants employed similar reading strategies; (4) the participants were more likely to tolerate ambiguity and predict the content when reading the narrative text than the expository text; (5) there was no set of strategies that distinguished proficient EFL readers from less proficient EFL readers; and (6) when identifying problems, the proficient EFL readers used fix-up strategies more effectively and were better able to provide satisfactory solutions than their counterparts. Pedagogical implications for EFL reading instruction are discussed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.273-290
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• 2011

This paper presents a case study involving one Korean primary school student and people around him in order to explore the reading process in English of a young Korean EFL learner and to investigate the social context in which his reading takes place. Six participants were included in the study (one primary school student and five adult participants). The student participant was asked to read a text in English and translate what he read into Korean and the teacher participants were asked to listen to the student's reading. Semi-structured interview was used to collect data from the student as well as five adult participants (his private tutor, his parent, his state school teacher, and two other state school teachers). The analysis reveals four characteristics of the way a young EFL learner approaches reading: word-by-word reading, disconnected word recognition, selective use of cues, and lack of awareness of difficulties. The four characteristics of Kilsu's reading suggest that reading can become a wild guessing game for young foreign learners, if they give selective attention to unimportant cues while reading. The pedagogical implications of this study are also discussed to help teachers designing reading lessons for young learners.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.189-208
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to investigate knowledge and use of English collocations in their relation to Korean college students' general English proficiency and writing abilities. Participants in the present study were 203 Korean college students. Their knowledge and use of English collocations were measured by a self-designed collocation test and an essay writing test. The findings were as follows: First, there was a significant difference in students' knowledge of collocations according to their general English proficiency. Students' performance in the collocation test increased as their level of proficiency increased. Second, there was a significant difference in students' knowledge of collocations according to their writing abilities. Students showed better performance in the collocation test as their level of writing abilities increased. Third, there was a significant difference in students' use of collocations according to their writing abilities. Students' collocation use in the writing test increased as their level of writing abilities increased. Fourth, there was a strong relationship between the students' knowledge of collocations and their general English proficiency and between the students' use of collocations and their writing abilities. Pedagogical implications of the study and suggestions for further research were discussed on the basis of the research findings.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.81-100
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• 2009

The current study reported on the continuing relevance of the schema theory for reading as it relates to the field of teaching and SLA, whilst highlighting the inherent limitations affecting individual learners. A relevant study was conducted for this article focusing on the extent to which university teacher trainees of English Education are exposed to second language readings with an adherence towards utilizing prior knowledge and drawing upon schemata to support their comprehension. Results from quantitative and qualitative data measured and collected from two groups of university students respectively, indicated certain advantages to this strategy use in respect of increased understanding, familiarity, and comfort level in SL reading. However, those same results identified existing limitations associated with cultural bias, stereotyping and a tendency to focus on wrong information when activating said schemata. As such, the purpose of this study is to promote awareness of the schema theory as an effective strategy option whilst reinforcing a need to pay heed to the concerns associated with strict reliance upon such theory to aid reading skills. Further discussion of these issues and pedagogical implications has been provided along with both suggested considerations regarding teaching for EFL teachers and evaluators.

• East Asian mathematical journal
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.393-420
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• 2015

The expectation and confirmation emerging as one of problem-solving strategies in the elementary school is a strategy that does not limited in the elementary school but used in the middle and high school. This strategy inevitably requires a process of adjustment that affected by the earlier expectation. Such an adjustment raised expectation and confirmation to one of effective problem-solving strategies. The adjustment is especially important to carry out the strategy effectively. The aim of this study was to conduct basic research on cognitive characteristics appearing to students when they carried out the expectation and confirmation strategy. We investigated and analyzed this in term of adjustment of expectation. To do this, we examined 50 5th graders' response in three kinds of word problems and interviewed with 4 participants who is using the expectation and confirmation strategy. The interview was conducted by using the items or solutions used in the test. From this, we tried to check students' cognitive characteristics and recognition on it's value. Furthermore we proposed the pedagogical implications associated with these results.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.73-89
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• 2007

This study explored the perception of transplanted English prosody by thirty American and Korean, male and female listeners. The English utterances of various sentence types produced by Korean and American male speakers were employed to transplant the American prosody contours to Korean English utterances. Then, the thirty subjects were instructed to rate the transplanted prosodic components. Results showed that the interactions between the three factors (e.g., rater groups & transplantation types; transplantation types & sentence types; rater groups & transplantation types & sentence types) turned out to be meaningful. Both Americans and Koreans perceived the effectiveness of the combined effect of transplanted duration and pitch or duration and pitch and intensity. However, when perceiving individual prosodic components, Americans and Koreans showed different perceptual ratings. As for the overall prosody change, Americans perceived the change of intensity in a significant way but Koreans did not because intensity is not a crucial semantic factor in Korean. Americans rated the transplantation of duration alone as ineffective while Koreans rated otherwise. This was explained by the difference between English and Korean. The difference of perspective was also significant with different sentence types, especially with the three sentence types that had speech rates slower than other sentence types. A slower speech rate intensified the mismatch between the transplanted duration and the original pitch causing a negative impression on American listeners whereas this did not affect Korean listeners. Pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.429-451
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• 2012

This paper examined eight novice elementary teachers' knowledge in terms of the types and sources of students' errors and teaching strategies on plane figures through a questionnaire and teachers' discussion. The teachers tended to predict students' diverse error types, but they attributed the sources of such errors mainly to their characteristics. The analysis of teachers' responses of teaching strategies revealed that they recognized the importance of the teacher's clear explanation and students' own problem-solving, while they were somewhat negative in presenting diverse examples and classifying, drawing, or constructing figures. Building on these results, this paper provides the implications for novice teachers' professional development programs.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.25-31
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• 2017

With tremendous advancement of information and communication technologies, mobile learning systems have been widely adopted in language learning contexts, and several frameworks have been developed for identifying and categorizing different factors of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL). However, pre-existing frameworks have limitations when evaluating the importance level of criteria. The purpose of this study is to develop a comprehensive hierarchical framework for identifying and categorizing success factors of MALL and prioritizing them according to the importance level. To do that, AHP method is used to quantitatively estimate weight values of MALL criteria. Results reveal that the priority of MALL criteria is ordered as follows: content, system, learner, language learning. Local weights of each criterion are also analyzed; for example, usefulness, accuracy, and authenticity are critical factors for improving MALL contents. Ease of use and mobility of MALL systems are also considered more critical than other systematic factors. In addition, availability of immediate feedback and self-directness has the highest weight values of importance. The findings of the study are discussed regarding hierarchical orders of MALL criteria and conclude that successful MALL implementation may be achieved if related elements are diversely measured and evaluated. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research are also presented.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.281-302
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• 2015

In the current study, answer sheets from 8007 students in 236 Korean schools were selected and analyzed to examine errors that emerge in the process of solving descriptive questions of the National Educational Achievement Assessment in mathematics. Questions used in the analysis were response assessment covering middle school mathematics topics: "mathematical symbols and equations" and "functions." The behavioral domain of the questions was that of "problem solving and computation," which requires establishing an equation for a word problem and allows the calculation of an answer that meets a certain condition. The analysis results revealed various errors in each stage of each question, from understanding to solving; the study attempts to conjecture causes for these errors and draw pedagogical implications.