• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.171-195
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• 2012

While noticing that there is insufficient interest in the assessment of EFL learners' vocabulary levels or sizes, the researchers developed two tests identical in form (Forms A and B) to assess the lexical knowledge of Korean university learners at the $1^{st}{\sim}10^{th}$ 1,000 word bands by adapting a pre-established vocabulary levels test (VLT). Of equal concern was to investigate if the VLT was equally a valid and reliable instrument to be used on measuring the lexical knowledge of EFL learners. The participants were 804 university freshmen enrolled in a General Education English Course from four different colleges. The learners were asked to respond to either Form A or B. While scores generally fell towards the lower frequency bands, multiple regression found the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) to be a significant variable for predicting the learners' vocabulary sizes. From a methodological perspective, however, noticeable differences between Forms A and B could be found with item response theory analysis. The findings of the study provide suggestions on how future VLT for testing EFL learners may have to be redesigned.

• Educational Technology International
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.137-168
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• 2019

This study examined the effects of information volume and distribution on learners' cognitive load and recall in a mobile augmented reality (AR) environment. Information volume refers to the degree of information users are provided in a learning task, while information distribution indicates the way in which information is distributed, either in a virtual or real format. Sixteen undergraduate students participated in the study, which employed a 2 × 3 randomized block factorial design with repeated measures. Information volume and distribution were independent variables, and factors in learners' cognitive load (mental effort, perceived ease of use, and perceived task difficulty) and recall test scores were the dependent variables. Information volume had significant main effects on perceived ease of use and task difficulty, and recall test scores, while information distribution had significant main effects on perceived task difficulty and test scores. A detailed discussion and implications are provided.

• 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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.35-48
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• 2001

One of the areas of second language acquisition that enjoyed popularity in recent years is interlanguage pragmatics. The main reason for this popularity lies in the critical role of pragmatic competence in appropriate use of a target language. The aim of this paper was to examine L2 learners' pragmatic behavior in their speech act performance and determine main sources causing pragmatic difficulty. Four major sources of pragmatic errors were identified: linguistic proficiency, L1 transfer, waffling and teaching activities. Each source was discussed with empirical evidence in some detail, and teaching suggestions were provided for developing learners' pragmatic competence in EFL classrooms.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1017-1041
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• 2011

This study investigates Korean EFL learners' awareness and use of the English existential there-construction by examining data collected from 54 Korean EFL learners of English by means of a pragmalinguistic judgment task and a controlled discourse completion task. The results of the judgment task reveal that lower proficiency learners rated canonical sentences and existentials with a preposed locative best in the communicative situations where the use of existentials would have been most appropriate. A comparison of the ratings by more proficient learners and native speakers shows that existentials received highest ratings by both groups where they are the most natural option, while canonical sentences received significantly higher ratings by the learners. With regard to the production data, learners tended to avoid existentials, but rather relied on canonical sentences. Existentials were rarely used by lower proficiency learners and not used productively even by more proficient learners in the situations where existentials would have been the most natural option. These results suggest that Korean learners' difficulty with the use of existentials is not merely a product of performance limitations, but attributable to limited knowledge about existentials and their syntactic alternatives in terms of contextual appropriateness. Lower proficiency learners lack such knowledge, and more proficient learners, while showing better awareness of the use of existentials, have problems as to the placement of new information when engaging in writing tasks that place lower level of demands on attention to the information status of noun phrases compared to communicative, oral tasks.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.17 no.12
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• pp.59-65
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the learning environment on the learning achievement of the learners and to improve the learning achievement of the learners while accepting the fact that it is difficult to change the class environment in which the middle and large group. Among the learner's positive and cognitive factors, we examined the factors that can classify learners into homogeneous groups in programming learning. The difficulty level of the learning contents influenced factors that classify the homogeneous group, and the factors were analyzed by dividing the intermediate difficulty and the final achievement. In addition, we examined the factors that affect the difference between two grades in order to analyze factors affecting steady learning regardless of difficulty level. It was found that the learners' personal motivation influenced the learning achievement of easy learning contents, and the performance self - efficacy had influence on the learning achievement and achievement of difficult learning contents.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.11-17
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• 2020

Non-tonal language speakers may have difficulty learning second language lexical tones. In the present study, we explored this issue with Korean-speaking learners of Mandarin Chinese (i.e., non-tonal first language speakers) by examining their perception and production of Mandarin lexical tones. In the perception experiment, the Korean learners were asked to listen to the tone of each stimulus and assign it to one of four Mandarin lexical tones using the response keys; in the production experiment, the learners provided speech production data for the lexical tones and then their productions were identified by native listeners of Mandarin Chinese. Our results showed that the Korean learners of Mandarin Chinese had difficulty in perceptually distinguishing Tone 2 and Tone 3, with the most frequent production error being the mispronunciation of Tone 3 as Tone 2. We also investigated whether unfamiliar non-native phonemes (i.e., Chinese phonemes) that do not exist in the native language phonemic inventory (i.e., Korean) may hinder the processing of the non-native lexical tones. We found no evidence for such effects, neither for the perception nor for the production of the tones.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.27-36
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• 2014

This study provided longitudinal examination of the Chinese learners' acquisition of Korean vowels. Specifically, I examined the Chinese learners' Korean monophthongs /i, e, ɨ, ${\Lambda}$, a, u, o/ that were created at the time of 1 month and 12 months, tried to verify empirically how they learn by dealing with their mother tongue, and Korean vowels through dealing with pattern of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (henceforth PAM) of Best (Best, 1993; 1994; Best & Tyler, 2007) and the Speech Learning Model (henceforth SLM) of Flege (Flege, 1987; Bohn & Flege, 1992, Flege, 1995). As a result, most of the present results are shown to be similarly explained by the PAM and SLM, and the only discrepancy between these two models is found in the 'similar' category of sounds between the learners' native language and the target language. Specifically, the acquisition pattern of /u/ and /o/ in Korean is well accounted for the PAM, but not in the SLM. The SLM did not explain why the Chinese learners had difficulty in acquiring the Korean vowel /u/, because according to the SLM, the vowel /u/ in Chinese (the native language) is matched either to the vowel /u/ or /o/ in Korean (the target language). Namely, there is only a one-to-one matching relationship between the native language and the target language. In contrast, the Chinese learners' difficulty for the Korean vowel /u/ is well accounted for in the PAM in that the Chinese vowel /u/ is matched to the vowel pair /o, u/ in Korean, not the single vowel, /o/ or /u/.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.49-58
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to compare learners' perceptions regarding the processes and the educational effects of fostering learner-generated questions in engineering education according to the questioning attitude of engineering learners. For this, after developing and implementing the appropriate strategies for fostering learner-generated questions in an engineering statistics course, this study analyzed 56 learners' survey responses and used ANOVA to investigate the group differences. The results showed that the educational effects and implications of fostering learner-generated questions were different according to the learners' questioning attitude. The study also confirmed that learners' questioning attitude should be considered as one of the important learner's characteristics in developing and implementing the strategies of fostering learner-generated questions in engineering education. Especially, fostering learner-generated questions produced positive effects on the passive questioning learners but not particularly on the learners who were asking no questions at all in other courses. Learners who asked no questions still have difficulty in generating deep meaningful questions and presenting them and thus require more instructors' strategies and active support for them.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.128-137
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• 2018

In the programming education, there is a great need of a teaching support system that can support the learner in the programming process regardless of the computer language due to instructor's difficulty of checking the progress of learners in real-time. Its importance is especially important in lower grade coding classes such as in K-12 education because they are not used to coding and so simple problems can be regarded as complex problems. For this, a pilot coding education support system based on Levenshtein distance algorithm which shows learners' progress to given solution in real-time was developed in order to help learners to solve complex problems easily, and the learners' motivation and self-efficacy was measured for estimating the usefulness of developed system targeting elementary school students. When the learners use the developed system, it was found that a statistically significant difference appears in the sub-factors of learning motivation compared with traditional class teaching environments. Among the sub-factors of self-efficacy, the efficacy dimension showed statistically significant difference too.