• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.37-54
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• 2009

This study investigated vocabulary learning strategies used by EFL middle school learners in Korea and examined the relationship between the middle school learners' vocabulary learning strategy (VLS) use and their vocabulary proficiency level. One hundred and forty-one students in a public middle school participated in the study and the data for this study were collected from a vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire and a vocabulary proficiency test. Based on the result of the vocabulary proficiency test, the participants were divided into three proficiency groups: high-, mid- and low- level proficiency groups. The overall findings of the study revealed that the participants used cognitive strategies most frequently and social strategies least frequently. The most frequently used individual strategies were 'using a bilingual dictionary,' 'studying the sound of a word' and 'practicing words through verbal repetition.' The least frequently used ones were 'interacting with native speakers' and 'studying or practicing the meaning of a word in a group.' The research results also showed that the vocabulary proficiency level has a significant influence on the vocabulary strategy use. The more proficient learners used vocabulary learning strategies more actively. More specifically, the high proficiency level group used metacognitive strategies the most. The middle and low proficiency groups used cognitive strategies the most. It is suggested that language teachers should facilitate the vocabulary learning process by helping learners develop appropriate strategies.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.471-478
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• 2010

This study analyzed the vocabulary level in the 'Water' unit of chemistry I textbook. It also analyzed its relevance to the 11th graders' vocabulary level. The main tool for analyzing vocabulary level was SWA(Science Word Analysis) program which was referenced the Standard Korean Dictionary and Graduated Vocabulary of Korean Language Education. The results in this study turned out to be as follows: The distribution of scientific vocabulary level increased from Level-1 to Level-3 and showed a tendency to decrease from Level-3 until Level-5. The average percentage of Out of level is the largest as 37%. The highest percentage of non-scientific vocabulary was Level-1. The distribution of non-scientific vocabulary level decreased progressively. The Level-5 and Out of level are used 18% averagely. So, there are 6 vocabularies of Level-5 and 82 vocabularies of extra-level inappropriate in scientific vocabularies. And there are 53 vocabularies of Level-5 and 145 vocabularies of Out of level inappropriate in non-scientific vocabularies. Therefore, the overall state of textbooks for grade 11 students are reasonable. But there are a great many vocabularies inappropriate for them. Those should be used minimum, and to be changed to the 1-4 of level vocabulary as stated in the student's level of understanding of appropriate vocabulary.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.123-139
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• 2011

This study sought to examine the impact of reading ability and vocabulary at age 5, as well as analyzing the impact which children's gender, parental education level and family income level has on reading comprehension ability and vocabulary at the first grade level in primary school. The study also sought to compare the characteristics of the results obtained in Korea and Japan on this particular research topic. For the Korean part of the study, 328 first grade Korean children, who had participated in the initial testing as five-year olds and agreed to participate in the longitudinal study were tested; whereas in Japan, 215 students were tested. The study results indicated that, in the case of Korea, reading comprehension ability in the first grade was affected by vocabulary and reading abilities at age 5, gender, as well as the mother's education level, in that order. In Japan, it was affected in the order of vocabulary, gender, and father's education level. In terms of first grade vocabulary, in the case of Korea, it was affected in the order of vocabulary and reading ability at age 5 and father's education level; whereas in Japan, it was affected in the order of vocabulary, gender, and reading ability. In both Korea and Japan, at age 5, vocabulary was shown to have a more significant impact than reading ability on both of language ability and vocabulary in the subsequent primary school period. As such, it can be seen that more interest should be shown not only in the ability to read at age 5 but also in expanding the vocabulary of children at this age through appropriate interaction and support.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.161-182
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to examine level of individual foreign learners' quantitative knowledge of korean vocabulary through the Foreign Learners' Korean Vocabulary Knowledge Assessment and to propose a vocabulary education plan reflecting the result. This assessment was written in focus of semantic relation to identify category, integrated and analytical knowledge of Korean verbs acquired by foreign learners and as a result, the following educational implications were made. First, the learners' knowledge about the vocabulary combinational relationship was very limited. Second, learners are not interested in vocabulary's synonymous relation and antonymous relations. Lastly, there needs to be a concern about postpositional particle-use education. The results of these kinds of research, observes the learners vocabulary acquisition process to determine Korean textbook and present vocabulary level in appropriate in terms of learners' perspective, and provide an opportunity to check if current professors' method is adequate and valid.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.61-94
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• 2020

The present study examined vocabulary usage in elementary English classrooms in Japan using elementary school corpus. The authors used three wordlists to benchmark the lexical items for four classes in the corpus: the CEFR-J, the General Service List (GSL), and Academic Word List (AWL). The percentage of vocabulary usage belonging to the Level A1 in the CEFR-J was below 15% (Class A: 12.1%, Class B: 12.6%, Class C: 8.9%, and Class D: 13.6%) with no statistical difference between levels. The mean ratio of Level A2 vocabulary items was below 10%, and all classes showed less than 1% of vocabulary usage for the Levels B1 and B2. Over 70% of all vocabulary items in the corpus belonged to the most frequent 1,000-word band (level 1) of the GSL, while the next most frequent word band (level 2 of the GSL and AWL) accounted for less than 10%. The results suggest that elementary school English teachers should use more vocabulary items in the CEFR-J Level A1. The findings demonstrate that elementary school teachers are less likely to expose their pupils to grammatically well-structured sentences with an abundance of lexical items since the teachers repeatedly use the same lexemes in each class.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.201-223
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to observe the effects of text modification by comparing differences in Korean reading comprehension levels that arise from differences in vocabulary levels in texts. This study intends to use simplified texts with the vocabulary difficulty adjusted differently from the original text to measure reading comprehension levels of Korean learners and analyze the result. To measure reading comprehension, the researcher divided 55 Korean learners of intermediate to advanced level of fluency into two groups; the control group read the original text and the treatment group read a simplified text in which complex vocabulary were substituted with easier words of medium difficulty. Then the two groups were tested with the same questionnaire to measure comprehension levels of each group. The result showed that the groups that read simplified texts scored higher than the control group; this suggests that the reading comprehension level was increased in the treatment group. The experiment confirmed that unknown vocabulary density has direct impact on Korean reading comprehension. The result shows that the proportion of unknown vocabulary should be reduced for meaning-focused reading. It also demonstrates that comprehension of the learner was enhanced with lexical simplification rather than structural simplification i.e. simplification of grammar or sentences. Thus, diverse reading materials adjusted to the learners' level of fluency should be developed to enable reading for learning Korean. By reducing the burden of understanding the meaning of each vocabulary, learners will be able to achieve the initial goal of reading.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.22
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• pp.303-327
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• 2011

This study aims to uncover the learner's language proficiency shown in the writing data of Chinese elementary/intermediate level learners. Language proficiency of the learners acquired by error analysis provides only partial information, and thus this study analyses the interlanguage of Korean learners in terms of 'Mean Length of Utterance, MLU' to discover the overall aspect of learner's language proficiency more symmetrically. The analysis of vocabulary area is to be enforced after generally studying the learner's language development aspect in accordance with MLU-m(orpheme) and MLU-(w)ord found in compositions by Chinese speaking Korean language learners. In terms of MLU, it has been slightly increased as the level of proficiency between elementary level and intermediate level learners; however, the morpheme seemed to be difficult to use, since the difference between Chinese learners and Korean university students has been notably shown. Vocabulary diversity, using aspect for each word class, and using aspect of the predicate are studied for vocabulary area; more various and numerous vocabulary tend to be used as the level of proficiency increases. In terms of predicate use, Chinese learners use less numerous vocabulary types.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.67-84
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• 2012

The present study investigated the effect of sentence translation as a production task on short-term and long-term retention of foreign vocabulary. 87 EFL university students at a beginning level, enrolled in reading class participated in the study. The study compared the performance of three groups on vocabulary recall: (1) Control group, (2) Translation group, and (3) Copy group. During the treatment sessions, translation group translated L1 sentences into English, while copy group simply copied given English sentences with each target word. Results of the immediate test were collected each week from week 2 to week 5 and analyzed by one-way ANOVA. Results revealed that regarding short-term vocabulary retention, participants in rote-copy condition outperformed those in translation group. Four weeks later a delayed test was administered to measure long-term vocabulary retention. In contrast, the results of two-way repeated measures ANOVA showed that long-term vocabulary retention of translation group was significantly greater than copy group. The findings suggest that although sentence translation is rather challenging to low-level learners, it may facilitate long-term retention of new vocabulary given the more elaborate and deeper processing the task entails.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.75-87
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• 2023

This paper presents a revised version of the vocabulary analyzer for self-reflection (VACSR), called VACSR v.2.0. The initial version of the VACSR automatically analyzes the occurrences and the level of vocabulary items in the transcribed texts, indicating the frequency, the unused vocabulary items, and those not belonging to either scale. However, it overlooked words with multiple parts of speech due to their identical headword representations. It also needed to provide more explanatory result tables from different corpora. VACSR v.2.0 overcomes the limitations of its predecessor. First, unlike VACSR v.1, VACSR v.2.0 distinguishes words that are different parts of speech by syntactic parsing using Stanza, an open-source Python library. It enables the categorization of the same lexical items with multiple parts of speech. Second, VACSR v.2.0 overcomes the limited clarity of VACSR v.1 by providing precise result output tables. The updated software compares the occurrence of vocabulary items included in classroom corpora for each level of the Common European Framework of Reference-Japan (CEFR-J) wordlist. A pilot study utilizing VACSR v.2.0 showed that, after converting two English classes taught by a preservice English teacher into corpora, the headwords used mostly corresponded to CEFR-J level A1. In practice, VACSR v.2.0 will promote users' reflection on their vocabulary usage and can be applied to teacher training.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.38
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• pp.461-500
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• 2015

This study aims to investigate the effective method to improve the competence of the Vocabulary by the image and listening towards the ELF. In the first part, we observed the problems and point improvement on learning vocabulary based on learner survey. In the second part, we analyzed two remarkable studies: - consistent and adapt method, communicational context - method based on the lexical, morphological semantical, notional and thematic field Then we proposed effective methods that are applicable to the vocabulary's learning in the class : - learning vocabulary by combining the words - learning vocabulary based on the meaning field - learning vocabulary as concrete characters - learning vocabulary by the descriptive character - learning vocabulary with the type "who am I?" - learning vocabulary by listening For teachers, one of the difficulties to the conduct of vocabulary course is that learners take passive position. Specifically, it is the teachers who play an important role because it runs in the direction of the course. However, learners do not show the active attitude for vocabulary lessons despite the course to take to improve their vocabulary skills. Therefore, teachers must prepare course materials that can both improve the competence of the vocabulary of learners and cause their interest or desire on the current vocabulary. This is why teachers should exploit various materials depending on the skill level of the learner vocabulary.