• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.47-66
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• 2007

Error analysis plays an important role because understanding the types of errors can give a better opportunity for both teachers and learners to recognize the nature of errors and ways of preventing them. This study looks into errors in the medical research abstracts written by 26 Koreans and also examines hedging expressions since hedging can be a necessary tactic in which the validity and objectivity of their claims is conveyed. The hedging expressions of these research abstracts are to be compared with those of Hyland (1996)'s study done on ENL academic writers of cell and molecular biology. The results of the study reveal that wrong word choice was the most commonly occurred errors, followed by prepositions, articles, adding and missing words. Many of these errors, except articles, seemed to derive from the native language interference. There were also run-on sentences, subject & verb agreement, tense, word order and minor errors. As for hedging, ESL medical writers seemed to use very limited hedging expressions and inappropriately strong modals. It is recommended to take variations of hedges using epistemic adverbials and adjectives to present their claims in a more valid and polite way. Limited verb choice was also noted. As for preventing or minimizing similar future errors, collocation practices in ESP focused on commonly used medical related words and expressions can be effective.

• Journal of the Korean BIBLIA Society for library and Information Science
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.129-147
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• 2009

The ultimate goal of classification systems is to provide tools for information management and services through collocation of information objects in similar topics. The National Research Council for Economics, Humanities, and Social Sciences(NRCS) aims to organize the research products from 23 research institutes. To manage and organize the research products effectively, the standard classification system has been developed in conjunction of users' survey and the Business Reference Model(BRM). Although the standard classification system consists of users' perspectives and the aspects of organizational functions, there are limits to apply the system into classification practices. In this study, the proposed hybrid approach is to combine a clustering approach with 1,884 keywords from the titles of research products between 2007 and 2008. The clustering approach is performed in a heuristic way according to the KDC due to the lack of digital full texts of research products. The results of this study proposed a revised standard classification system for NRCS with 16 headings and 90 sub-headings. The revised standard classification system will play an important role in managing research products effectively.