• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.6
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• pp.179-197
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• 2000

Of interest to second language researchers and classroom teachers today is whether and in what wats formal instruction can promote the development of appropriate use of the target language. Most formal instruction is closely related with the use of textbooks in ESL classrooms, so this study focuses on ESL textbooks. In order to learn to communicate successfully, students should use textbooks which specify the rules of language use for the community in which they are operating. This study examines the speech acts of compliment across 8 middle school English textbooks published in Korea. This study analyses the speech acts of compliment according to the following criteria : 1) vocabulary - adjective, verb, intensifier 2) sentence pattern 3) social strategy - invitation to talk, greetings, farewells, expression of gratitude, etc. 4) types of response. As a result of this study some suggestions is giver to promote the development of appropriate use of English through English textbooks.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.1-10
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• 2022

The advancement of Internet technologies has provided a new and effective way to cultivate international talents. To investigate the effect of native English teachers' online synchronous classes on Chinese primary school students' oral English improvement, an 18-month quasi-experimental study was conducted on 300 primary school students in China. The experiment and control groups were provided biweekly synchronous online classes with native and non-native English teachers. SPSS was used to conduct Paired Sample T-Tests and analyze performance differentials. The results showed that online classes taught by native English teachers perform better than non-native English teachers in three areas: vocabulary accuracy, average sentence length, and phonological intonation.

• 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.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.125-146
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• 2015

This study investigated the contribution of Korean phonological awareness to English phonological awareness and the relations of phonological awareness with reading and writing in Korean Hangul and English among Korean 5th graders. With age and vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled, Korean phonological awareness was transferred to English phonological awareness. Specifically, syllable and phoneme awareness in Korean transferred to syllable awareness in English, and Korean phoneme awareness transferred to English phoneme awareness. In addition, English phoneme awareness independently explained significant variance of reading and writing in Korean and English after controlling for age and vocabulary. Syllable awareness in Korean and English explained Hangul reading and writing, respectively. The results suggest cross-language transfer of phonological awareness that is a metalinguistic skill. Phoneme awareness is important in reading and writing in English whereas both of syllable and phoneme awareness are important in literacy of Korean.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.193-206
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• 2011

The purpose of the study is to examine the use of emotion vocabulary by Korean English learners. Three basic emotion fields, pleasure, anger, and fear were selected to elicit the participants' responses. L1 English speakers' data was also collected for comparison. The major results are as follows. First, English learners responded with various inappropriate verb forms like I feel~, I am~ while the majority of English native speaking teachers responded with subjunctive forms like I would feel~. In addition, L2 English learners used mostly simple and coordination sentences. Second, the lexical richness, measured through type/token ratio, was higher in English L1 data than in English L2 data. The proportion of emotion lemmas reflects the lexical richness or the diversity of the emotion words. Lastly, L2 English learners' responses focused on a few typical adjectives like happy, angry and scared. This structural and semantic distinctiveness of Korean English learners' emotion words was discussed from pedagogical perspectives.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.177-196
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• 2003

The purpose of this study is to help teachers and program developers develop comprehensive and authentic assessment models with appropriate ways of using various kinds of assessment tools in college English instruction and assessment. Assessing by traditional discrete tests based on grammar and vocabulary cannot measure the authentic ability for language use in meaningful context in the real world. Currently, the trend in language assessment is changing to performance assessment. Increased use of performance assessments that involve language students in selecting and reflecting on their learning means that language teachers will have a wider range of evidence on which to judge whether students are becoming purposeful and are able to communicate as English users. Also, language programs focused on performance assessment are likely to instil in students authentic skills related to communication in the global world and enable them to evaluate what they learn from their English classes. In this study, the author investigated the theoretical background, the need of change, and several types of performance assessment.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.24
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• pp.99-111
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• 2011

This paper is a comparative study of English loans in Russian and Swahili. In the twenty first century, due to the advantage of English as a global language, a language of technology and business, it has had contact with many languages of the world and has become a major source of loans to many languages. Though very different from each other, both Russian and Swahili currently have English as their main source of loanwords. This study reports the extensive adaptation of English loans by Russian and Swahili and examines how these loan items are assimilated into the two languages. It concludes that besides the adaption of pure English loans they have both employed other strategies such as loan translations, semantic extensions and loanblends for vocabulary expansion.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.139-157
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• 2006

As the Communicative Approach has become the norm in foreign language teaching, the objectives of teaching English in school have changed radically in Korea. The focus in high school English textbooks has shifted from mere mastery of structures to communicative proficiency. This paper will study five polysemous words which appear in twelve high school English textbooks used in Korea. The twelve text books are incorporated into a single corpus and analyzed to classify the usage of the selected words. Then the usage of each word was compared with that of three other corpora based sources: the BNC(British National Corpus) Sampler, ICE Singapore(International Corpus of English for Singapore) and Collins COBUILD learner's dictionary which is based on the corpus, "The Bank of English". The comparisons carried out as part of this study will demonstrate that Korean text books do not always supply the full range of meanings of polysemous words.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.157-175
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to compare learners' view on Korean and native teachers of English with regard to competence of teaching skills. A total of 166 high school students attending the same high school in Korea participated in a questionnaire survey. The students were asked a series of questions about their five Korean teachers of English and three natives. The analysis of the results indicates that the learners believed Korean English teachers would be better in teaching vocabulary, grammar and reading than native English teachers. The learners answered native English teachers would be better in teaching speaking, listening, and writing. In the areas of the accuracy of classroom language, the level of teacher-centeredness, and the amount of cultural information given in a classroom, there were no significant differences in the learners' responses between Korea and native teacher of English. By recognizing the differences of the learners' views on two different types of ELT teachers, we suggest that it would be beneficial for learners if we would utilize their views in designing and administrating a team-teaching program.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.27-56
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• 2011

The analysis on the use of lexical discovery and consolidation strategies that have been researched within the area of vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) have not sufficiently drawn the interest of EFL practitioners with regard to vocational high school learners. The results, however, are expected to have implications for the design of vocabulary tasks and instructional materials for EFL learners. The present study investigates EFL vocational high school learners' use of lexical discovery and consolidation strategies with questionnaires, where the use of the learners' lexical discovery strategies were further validated with the think-aloud methodology by asking samples of proficient and less proficient learners to report on their reading process while reading L2 texts that had not been exposed to the learners. The results indicated that there were significant differences between the two groups of learners in the employment of 11 of the strategies which were in the categories of determination, social, memory, and metacognitive strategies, but not for cognitive strategies. The pattern of strategies indicated that different lexical discovery and consolidation strategies were employed relatively more by one proficiency group than another. The study suggests some implications for how strategy-based instruction can be implemented in EFL classrooms.