• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.19-33
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• 2019

This paper examines the perception of Korean phonemes by Egyptian learners of Korean and presents the learnability gradient of Korean consonants and vowels through High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT). 50 Egyptian learners of Korean (27 low proficiency learners and 23 high proficiency learners) participated in 10 sessions of HVPT for Korean vowels, word initial and final consonants. Participants were tested on their identification ability of Korean vowels, word initial consonants, and syllable codas before and after the training. The results showed that both low and high proficiency groups did benefit from the training. Low proficiency learners showed a higher improvement rate than high proficiency learners. Based on the HVPT results, a learnability gradient was established to give insights into priorities in teaching Korean sounds to Egyptian learners.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.25-49
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• 2006

Though a large amount of research concerning listening strategies has been conducted, the strategic behaviors of younger students in this area have received less attention. This study is a follow up study of an earlier case study by the author (2006). The purpose of this study is to verify what listening strategies Korean elementary learners use in a general L2 listening situation. 213 elementary students participated in this study, and a listening strategy questionnaire was used. ANOVA, MANOVA, Correlation and Multiple Regression Analysis were used to interpret the data. The results of this study reveal that younger participants used all four types of listening strategies, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive and affective, fairly often; however, the results also show that they differ in how frequently they use each strategy according to their listening proficiency. Overall, highly proficient learners use more strategies compared to less proficient learners. High proficiency learners use compensation strategies most and cognitive strategies least. Low proficient learners use affective strategies most and compensation strategies least. Moreover, the results showed no significant grade- or gender-related strategic behaviors, and also showed that L2 listening proficiency can be a significant predictor of strategic behavior of young learners. 12% of the variance in L2 strategic behaviors was attributable to L2 listening proficiency.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.1-16
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• 2008

The purpose of the present study is to explain the effects of academic self-efficacy, self-regulated learning and online task value on academic achievement and learning transfer in corporate cyber education. 202 students who completed S corporate's cyber courses in 2007 and responded to all survey participated in this study. A hypothetical model was proposed, which was composed of academic self-efficacy, online task value and self-regulated learning factors as prediction variables, and learning transfer as well as academic achievement factors as outcome variables. The results of this study through regression analysis as follows. First, learners' academic self-efficacy, self-regulated learning and online task value predict learners' academic achievement significantly. Second, except for academic self-efficacy, learners' self-regulated learning and online task value predict on learners' learning transfer significantly. Third, academic achievement plays a role as mediating value in predicting academic achievement by online task. It implies that learners' academic self-efficacy, online task value and self-regulated learning which predict learners' academic achievement and learning transfer should be considered in developing strategies for the design and operation of cyber courses.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.61-85
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• 2006

The purpose of the present study is to compare Korean EFL learners' speech corpus (i.e. oral productions) with their composition corpus (i.e. written productions). Four college students participated in the study. The composition corpus was collected through a writing assignment, and the speech corpus was gathered by audio-taping their oral presentations. The results of the data analysis indicate that (i) As for error frequency, young adult low-intermediate Korean EFL learners showed high frequency in determiners (mostly, indefinite articles), vocabulary (mostly, semantic errors), and prepositions. The frequency order did not show much difference between the speech corpus and the composition corpus; and (ii) When comparing the oral productions with the written productions, there were not many differences between them in terms of the contents, a style (i.e., colloquial vs. literary), vocabulary selection, and error types and frequency. Therefore, it is assumed that the proficiency in oral presentation of EFL learners at this learning stage heavily depends on how much/how well they are able to write. In other words, EFL learners' writing and speaking skills are closely co-related. It implies that the teacher does not need to separate teaching how to speak from teaching how to write. The teacher may use the same methods or strategies to help the learners improve their English speaking and writing skills. Furthermore, it will be more effective to teach writing before speaking since they have more opportunities to write than speak in the EFL contexts.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.67-75
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• 2022

Recently, e-learning has been attracting significant attention due to COVID-19. However, while e-learning has many advantages, it has disadvantages as well. One of the main disadvantages of e-learning is that it is difficult for teachers to continuously and systematically monitor learners. Although services such as personalized e-learning are provided to compensate for the shortcoming, systematic monitoring of learners' concentration is insufficient. This study suggests a method to evaluate the learner's concentration by applying machine learning techniques. In this study, emotion and gaze data were extracted from 184 videos of 92 participants. First, the learners' concentration was labeled by experts. Then, statistical-based status indicators were preprocessed from the data. Random Forests (RF), Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and an ensemble model have been used in the experiment. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) has also been used for comparison. As a result, it was possible to predict e-learners' concentration with an accuracy of 90.54%. This study is expected to improve learners' immersion by providing a customized educational curriculum according to the learner's concentration level.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.75-85
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• 2000

Koreans and English have different phonotactic constraints and phonological rules. It causes Korean learners to have difficulty in pronouncing certain English consonant clusters correctly. This paper aims to discuss what English consonant clusters are difficult for Korean learners to learn and why this difficulty arises by comparing phonotactic constraints and phonological rules of English and Korean.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.1113-1124
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• 2005

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to develop an e-Learning program about medication for nurses to enhance nurses' medication performance ability and to analyze learners' responses after studying with this program. Method: For the development of the e-Learning program, the NBISD(Network Based Instructional Systems Design) model, suggested by Jung(I999) was applied as a basic model and the instruction design theory of Gagne & Briggs(1979) and ARCS theory of Keller(I983) were applied. After the operation of this program for one month to 34 new nurses, learners' responses were analyzed. Result: Learners' knowledge of medication was greatly improved after this program. In addition learners' satisfaction with the overall education program, help in field applicability, ease of screen shift and exploration, and tutor activities were high and the contents were regarded suitable for e-Learning. Many things were advantageous such as easy accessibility, easy understandability with pictures and flash animation, practical cases and feedback from a tutor. Provision of a supplementary handout and improvement of a tight time schedule were pointed out as things to be improved. Conclusion: This e-Learning program can be used effectively for medication education for registered nurses, student nurses, and new nurses.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.6
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• pp.219-239
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• 2000

There has been a growing enthusiasm in Korea for the early education of English as a foreign language (EFL). The present study examined the validity of the Critical Period Hypothesis in terms of the Universal Grammar (UG), in three different types of learning contexts - first language (L1), second language (SL), and foreign language (FL) learning contexts. While previous research findings in L1 and SL learning contexts suggest that UG principles and parameters are accessible to language learners only for the early years of lifetime, this article argues that their results - and even the methods - cannot be applied to EFL settings and that independent studies on the EFL context are, required. It also proposes the recent UG notion of functional categories as the most appropriate subject in the discussion of Korean EFL learners' access to UG. Findings on foreign language contexts, including the author's own, strongly indicate that UG is not sensitive to learners' starting ages in FL settings. If young children in FL contexts cannot develop their interlanguage grammar based on UG, the existing teaching methods for young children should be revised.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.61-73
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• 2011

The analysis on learners made through the study focuses on the intention of the participants in the learning activities of the robot programming. Therefore, for the analysis of the learners' intention, which is tried in the study, TAM, the analysis tool used for understanding buying acts or buying intention of buyers in the business sector, is basically utilized, and the Flow theory is additionally applied, trying to know, through the quantum analysis methods, the factors to give influence on the intention for learners to take part in the robot programming lesson. For this, a quantum analysis was made by PLS analysis, a kind of structural equations. As the result of the analysis, it is confirmed that such factors as 'recognized utility' and 'recognized readiness' and 'Flow' give significant influence on the intention of learners' participation in the lesson. As the result of the synthetic analysis and in regard with the value of the programming lesson, it is found that the following factors give actual influence to the intention of learners: the group where learners belong or teaching-learning organizations together with creating social rapport, learning tasks given for learners, etc.