• 음성과학
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• 제7권2호
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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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• 제6권2호
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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.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2000년도 7월 학술대회지
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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.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제16권1호
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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.

• 한국영어학회지:영어학
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• 제4권1호
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• pp.83-102
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to find out some major characteristics of intermediate-advanced Korean learners' English by corpus- linguistically analyzing their essays in comparison with native speakers'. We construct a corpus of CBT TOEFL essays by Korean learners, NNS1 (94076 words in 402 texts), and its sub-corpus, NNS2 (14291 words in 45 texts), and then a corpus of model essays written or meticulously edited by native speakers, NS (14833 words in 35 texts). We compare NNS1 and NNS2 with NS, and with some other corpora, in terms of high-frequency words, and show that Korean learners' writings have more features of informal writing than those of formal writing, which is in accord with the reports in Granger (1998) that EFL writings by European advanced learners are characterized by informality.

• 한국영어학회지:영어학
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• 제1권1호
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• pp.187-209
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• 2001

This study attempts to supplement what is known about the influence of prior knowledge on second language listening comprehension. To do so, the study examines the effect of prior knowledge and language proficiency on the ability of L2 listeners to understand texts. The purpose of an experiment was to determine the effect of topic familiarity on the L2 listening comprehension ability of subjects who varied in L2 listening proficiency level. The subjects (N=117) were selected from a population of college students enrolled in the Departments of English and Business in Korea. English listening proficiency levels were designated on the basis of TOEFL listening scores. Subjects listened twice each to texts (more familiar and less familiar). After listening to each text, a ten-item objective test was administered to test the subjects' comprehension of the information presented in the text. Objective tests were analyzed. using repeated measures analysis. A post hoc test was conducted to identify the means that were significantly different. This study yielded the following results: (1) subjects with high prior knowledge comprehended texts significantly better than did subjects with low prior knowledge; (2) the level of L2 listening proficiency had a significant effect on the L2 listening comprehension of texts, but there was no interaction between prior knowledge and the level of L2 listening proficiency.

• 한국콘텐츠학회논문지
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.329-339
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• 2011

본 연구는 비영어권 OECD 21개 국가들을 대상으로 영어능력과 경제활동(국가별 무역량, R&D투자 등), 그리고 경제 성장률과의 관계 분석을 통하여 영어능력이 국가의 경제성장에 미치는 영향을 실증적으로 규명하고자 하였다. 단순회귀분석(OLS)과 표면상무관회귀분석(Seemingly Unrelated Regression Estimation: SURE)의 기법을 사용하여 추정한 결과 체코, 핀란드, 그리고 폴란드를 제외한 여타 국가들에서는 영어능력이 직접적으로 경제성장에 정(+)의 효과를 미친다는 통계학적 유의성이 발견되지 않았다. 그러나 영어 능력은 무역량 증진의 기여를 통하여 간접적으로 경제성장에 영향을 끼치는 것으로 나타났다. 따라서 영어 능력은 경제성장에 있어서 하나의 필요조건이지 충분조건은 아닌 것으로 결론 지울 수 있다. 더불어 영어 능력은 최소한의 물적 자본과, 기술축적, 정치적 안정, 그리고 훌륭한 통치를 보완하는 충분한 보완재 역할을 담당한다면 경제성장에 긍정적인 영향을 끼칠 것이 예상된다.