• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.157-175
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• 2000

The aim of this paper was to diagnose Korean college students' listening skills on the TOEFL. The researchers identified which section, among the TOEFL listening Part A, B, and C, is most easily teachable/ improvable during the period of a semester. First, the result of this research shows that Korean students tend to have lower scores in Part A than Part B or Part C. The results indicate that the short informal conversation doesn't give sufficient clues to students, and they don't have enough time to infer the answer. Second, the results revealed that. students showed the lowest progress in Part B after they studied TOEFL listening items and essential idioms for the listening section for 13 weeks. Because students didn't have much experience learning the informal conversation as opposed to the formal one in English, it is harder to achieve an improved grade in Part B, which consists of the informal conversation. But after a semester-long listening course, the average score on TOEFL listening sections increased.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.33-40
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• 2010

This study aims at investigating the linguistic and educational factors affecting TOEFL scores, focusing on three OECD countries, Korea, Japan, and Finland. The data comprise document analysis on curriculums, websites, and literature. The findings reveal that the number of Korean test-takers and their TOEFL scores gradually increased year by year. Finnish test-takers consistently gained greatly high scores, and Japanese examinees showed the lowest scores. The languages Korean, Japanese, and Finnish are all far distant from English and receive little support on historical grounds from the Indo-European family tree. In Finland, however, Swedish which belongs to Indo-European languages is still used as an official language with Finnish. Korea and Finland adopt English education from Year 3 in primary school, whereas English is not an official subject in primary school at present in Japan. Finnish students are taught a foreign language in addition to English from primary school. These seem to support the result of the high TOEFL scores of Finnish test-takers. This study concludes that social context which includes linguistic and educational environments are the main factors which affect TOEFL scores.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.153-171
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• 2003

The scores of TOEFL, TOEIC, and TEPS have been increasingly used for many purposes in Korea. In particular, these test scores are being used as a predictor for determining readiness for and success in college work, or as a measure of the testees' overall English proficiency. Nonetheless, studies have rarely proposed that the validity of the test scores is used for either purpose. As a preliminary step to explore the predictive validity of the test scores, we collected the scores of TOEFL, TOEIC, and TEPS from thirty students of a university as well as their cumulative grade point averages (GPAs). The correlations between the test scores and GPAs show that TOEFL will be most likely to have the highest validity coefficient as a predictor for determining success in college work as well as a measure of overall English proficiency. Although this study has a few limitations such as the small number of participants, their homogeneousness as a group, etc., it provides some insight into the use of the three tests for college admissions and measurement of overall English proficiency and suggests need for conducting further validation studies in these areas.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2000.09a
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• pp.919-922
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• 2000

본 논문에서는 판단 보조 시스템으로써의 기능을 수행하는 Artificial Neural Network(ANN) 시스템의 응용과 설계를 수행하였다. ANN 시스템의 응용에 있어 실질적으로 활용이 가능한 미 경영대학원 진학 희망자들을 위한 학교 선별 시스템을 구현하였다. 미국 소재의 대부분의 경영대학원에서는 입학 지원자의 평가항목으로써 대학평점(GPA), TOEFL(Test Of English as Foreign Language), GMAT(Graduate Management Admission Test), Essay 그리고 실무 경력을 요구한다. 본 논문에서 소개하는 학교 선별 시스템에서는 이러한 평가 항목 중 객관적인 평가가 가능하고 수치화 할 수 있는 세가지 요소만을 고려했다. 즉, Essay와 실무 경력과 같은 평가항목은 각 학교별 다소 주관적인 평가가 이루어지기 때문에 배제하고 보다 객관적이라고 할 수 있는 GPA, TOEFL. GMAT 만을 평가 항목으로 고려했다. 일반적으로 경영대학원에서는 최소의 TOEFL 점수를 요구하고 있다는 점을 고려해 TOEFL 점수에 우선 순위를 두고 각 학교를 크게 4개의 그룹으로 나누어 4개의 각기 다른 Network를 설계했다 최소 5년 이상의 유학 상담 경험이 있는 현직 전문가들을 통해 본 논문에서 소개하는 시스템의 성능을 검증 받았다.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.191-210
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• 2004

The scores of TOEFL, TOEIC and TEPS have been increasingly used for many purposes in Korea In particular, these test scores are being used as a measure of the test-takers' overall communicative competence. Nonetheless, few studies have been conducted that investigate the validity of the test scores used for this purpose. As a preliminary step to explore the validity of the test scores, we conducted a small scale study by comparing 30 university students' scores in TOEFL, TOElC and TEPS with their class performances in English conversation and composition courses. The correlations between the test scores and the grade point averages of the courses show that the test scores are much harder to use as a valid measure of test-takers' overall communicative competence than usually thought to be and that the score in TOEFL is, nonetheless, a more reliable measure than the ones in the other tests. Although tins study has a few limitations such as the small number of participants, the homogeneity of the sample as a group, etc, it provides some insight into the use of the three tests for measurement of overall communicative proficiency and suggests need for conducting further validation studies in these areas.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.69-76
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• 2004

E-learning is the application of e-business technology and services to teaching and learning. It use of new multimedia technologies and Internet to improved the quality of learning by facilitating access to remote resources and services. In this paper, we show a web-based test system, which is carefully designed and implemented based on the real TOEFL CBT. The system consists of a contents delivery mechanism, computer-adaptive test algorithm, and review engine. In this papepr, we describe design and implementing issues of web-based test systems.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.113-132
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• 2004

This study aims to suggest desirable directions through analyzing English test items of college entrance examinations(CEE) in Korea, China, and Japan. To achieve this, English test items of Scholastic Ability Test(SAT) in Korea were compared with those of CEE in China and Japan, and test items of TOEFL and IELTS. It was found that there were not many items for testing productive skills relatively to the tests of other countries including TOEFL and IELTS. Especially, there were integrated items for writing test in China. In case of speaking test, all the other country adopted direct ways like interview and oral test, not indirect test as in the SAT in Korea. It is suggested that there need to be included test items comprising long passages in order to measure extensive reading ability. It can be suggested that doze test be adopted for testing integrated proficiency of English.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.88-95
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• 2000

This paper attempts to investigate characteristic features of Japanese EFL learners' English intonation and how their Japanese accents are affecting their English intonation, focusing on a comparison between the accent patterns of Japanese compounds and the stress patterns of English compounds. It is based on research dedicated to helping to improve the teaching and learning of English intonation (prosody) for Japanese EFL learners. It examines the Fundamental Frequency (henceforth Fx) contours of two EFL college students, one specializing in English and the other in Japanese. Both of them may be considered upper intermediate EFL students with their TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores ranging between 500 and 550.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.68-73
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• 2009

Recently, various services through the Internet are gradually increased and developed. The traditional way of examination has been replacing by the online test as well. The most representative is the IBT TOEFL by the ETS in the US. Besides this, a lot of online tests and some related discussions are very fierce to carry out due to the continuous increase of the number of exam candidates. Taking account of the economic issues compared to the previous test, this online method has a lot of strengths. This paper aims to build an online test system based on the 3- tier browser-server architecture, which is different from the commonly used 2-tier based system. This system was achieved using the Visual Studio.Net 2005 and SQL Server 2000 as development tools, and based on the ASP.NET 2.0 platform, using the ADO.NET and C# language.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.123-142
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• 2009

The present study used multi-faceted Rasch measurement to explore the characteristics and bias patterns of non-native raters when they scored L2 writing tasks. Three raters scored 254 writing tasks written by Korean university students on two topics adapted from the TOEFL Test of Written English (TWE). The written products were assessed using a five-category rating scale (Content, Organization, Language in Use, Grammar, and Mechanics). The raters only showed a difference in severity with regard to rating categories but not in task types. Overall, the raters scored Grammar most harshly and Organization most leniently. The results also indicated several bias patterns of ratings with regard to the rating categories and task types. In rater-task bias interactions, each rater showed recurring bias patterns in their rating between two writing tasks. Analysis of rater-category bias interaction showed that the three raters revealed biased patterns across all the rating categories though they were relatively consistent in their rating. The study has implications for the importance of rater training and task selection in L2 writing assessment.