• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.109-132
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• 2003

The purpose of the present study is to explore effective ways of teaching English grammar, which is geared toward improving students' communicative competence. Grammatical competence is essential to communicative competence. Grammatical knowledge cannot be acquired unconsciously in an EFL environment such as in Korea. Therefore learners should be given grammar instruction. More importantly, they should be instructed in grammar so that they can develop their grammatical abilities which are the foundation of communicative competence. The following is proposed for the grammar instruction placing the focus on improving communicative competence. First, it is effective to explain the form, meaning and pragmatics of a grammatical rule to learners in Korean. Second, learners should be given instruction in grammatical patterns that deals with constructions and meanings together, which can enable them to produce sentences by themselves. Third, it should be taught to understand constructions and meanings on the basis of word orders. Then the following steps of grammar instruction are suggested. In the first step of grammatical instruction, students should be provided with the illustrations of grammatical structures which link communicative functions and grammar. In the second step, learners should be gotten to practice grammatical constructions repeatedly enough to use them unconsciously. Lastly, communicative activities such as description and role plays should be included in grammar instruction to integrate grammar practice and communicative language use.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.30-43
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• 2022

In this study, elementary students' science communication competence was investigated based on the grammatical features expressed in their language-use in classroom discourse and science writings. The classes were designed to integrate the evidence-based reasoning framework and traditional learning cycle and were conducted on fifth graders in an elementary school. Eight elementary students' discourse data and writings were analyzed using lexico-grammatical resource analysis, which examined the discourse text's content and logical relations. The results revealed that the student language used in analyzing data, interpreting evidence, or constructing explanations did not precisely conform to the grammatical features in science language use. However, they provided examples of grammatical metaphors by nominalizing observed events in the classroom discourses and those of causal relations in their writings. Thus, elementary students can use science language grammatically from science language-use experiences through listening to a teacher's instructional discourses or recognizing the grammatical structures of science texts in workbooks. The opportunities in which elementary students experience the language-use model in science learning need to be offered to understand the appropriate language use in the epistemic context of evidence-based reasoning and learn literacy skills in science.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.19-38
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• 2010

This study surveyed L2 learners' needs for different components of communicative competence. It aimed to determine what abilities the learners strongly need to achieve communicative competence in different learning contexts. It also examined gender differences in the learners' need for phonological competence. A total of 359 students participated in this study, divided into three learner groups: high school, vocational college, and university students. The data were collected via a questionnaire, which was based on Bachman's (1990) framework of language competence. The study drew some important findings: (a) The vocational trainees expressed a stronger need for illocutionary competence than the high school students and for sociolinguistic competence than the high school and the university groups; (b) The high school and the university groups equated grammatical, textual, illocutionary, and strategic competences in their needs with lesser attention to sociolinguistic competence; (c) To the high school and the university groups, pragmatic competence was assessed higher than organizational competence; (d) Female students showed greater sensitivity to pronunciation ability than did male students. On the basis of these results, pedagogical implications are discussed, along with some helpful suggestions.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.71-90
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• 2003

The purpose of this paper is to discuss recent notions of communicative competence, especially as it is presented in Korean EFL education. Communicative competence has been modified and reinterpreted several times since the term was introduced by Hymes (1970). Paulston (1974) and Savignon (1983) focus on social interaction while Canale and Swain (1980) offer four categories of communicative competence: grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. In addition, Tarone and Yule (1989) can be viewed as a systematic and comprehensive concept as well as a multi-dimensional mode (Bachman, 1990). Brown (2000) presents linguistic and functional aspects and Savignon's (1983) sociolinguistic competence has been transformed into sociocultural competence (Savignon, 2001). This study shows which aspects of Korean EFL education have been changed' and what needs to be accomplished for enhancing student's communicative competence.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.49-57
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• 2016

This paper aims to explore instructional design of a cyber classroom for secondary students' basic English language competence. A paucity of support for low or under achieving students' English learning exists particularly at the secondary level. In order to bridge the gap, there has been demand for online educational resources considered to be an effective tool in improving students' self-directed learning and motivation. This study employs a comprehensive approach to instructional design for the asynchronous cyber classroom with the underlying premise that different learning theories can be applied in a complementary manner to serve different pedagogical purposes best. Gagné's conditions of learning theory, Bruner's constructivist theory, Carroll's minimalist theory, and Vygotsky's social cognitive development theory serve as the basis for designing instruction and selecting appropriate media. The ADDIE model is used to develop online teaching and learning materials. Twenty-five key grammatical features were selected through the analysis of the national curriculum of English, being grouped into five units. Each feature is covered in one cyber asynchronous class. An Integration Class is given at the end of every five classes for synthesis, where students can practice grammatical features in a communicative context. Related theories, pedagogical practices, and practical web-design strategies for cyber Basic English classes are discussed with suggestions for research, practice and policy to support self-directed learning through a cyber class.

• Journal of Industrial Convergence
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.93-99
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• 2020

The Journal of Industrial Management Society in Republic of Korea. In order to explore the effect of overseas language training on the development of foreign language accuracy, this study investigates the errors in English compositions produced by 27 Korean university students who received overseas language training for 15 weeks. For data collection, students were made to take two tests, a pretest and a posttest, a semester apart. The differences in composition elements and errors between the two tests were examined and statistical analyses were performed. Results showed that while the average length of the compositions and sentences increased, the number of sentences decreased in the posttest. Also, more errors were found in the posttest where the students tried to construct more complex sentence structures. The students' ability to generate sentences were found to have improved, while their competence in using grammatical elements accurately within sentences did not see great improvement. This implies that overseas language training was not effective for aiding the development of one's grammatical accuracy of a foreign language over a 15-week period for the students.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.1-15
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• 2002

The English education policy of Korea has focused on cultivating communicative competence in Korean students. Especially the 6th national curriculum adopted a notional-functional syllabus instead of a grammatical-structural syllabus. The syllabus design of the 7th curriculum is different from that of the 6th curriculum in that the 6th curriculum adopted just one syllabus design-the Notional-Functional syllabus, but the 7th curriculum includes various syllabus types. The present study has two purposes. The first purpose is to historically survey syllabus design development in Korea : grammatical-structural syllabus(the 1st-5th curriculum), notional-functional syllabus(the 6th curriculum) and a new syllabus model(the 7th curriculum). The second purpose is to analyze the syllabus design of the 7th national curriculum according to the following criteria : a) communicative functional categories, b) sample sentences. The data was collected by analyzing the 7th grade English textbooks adopted on the basis of the 7th national curriculum.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2006

This study investigates the types of interactional modifications employed by Japanese and Korean university students during text-based chats. In particular, this study focuses on the role of a network-based medium on the use of interactional modifications, which have been claimed to facilitate interlanguage development. The results show that students use a variety of features of interactional modifications. The most used strategies were the use of paralinguistic features, framing, overt indication of understanding/agreement, and clarification checks, which reveals inconsistent results with findings from research on the negotiation of meaning in face-to-face interaction. Results suggest that the computer-mediated communication (CMC) environment requires the above mentioned strategies and students are able to adapt to this new context by employing alternative strategies. The majority of negotiations were generated by content and lexical items either to resolve communication problems or to better manage interactions, and very few negotiations occurred in terms of grammar. The findings suggest that text-based synchronous chats can be an effective tool for promoting interactive competence, but their effectiveness on grammatical development is uncertain.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.169-184
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to identify the most important factor(s) that contribute(s) to the overall oral proficiency and to examine whether the factor(s) play(s) a different role depending on the proficiency level of learners. Learners were divided into novice group and advanced group and were asked to produce an oral recording of a story based on a comic strip. The recordings were transcribed and graded by three raters. According to the results, the raters attained high inter-rater reliability when assessing advanced learners. However, the reliability level became considerably lower in the assessment of novice learners. The best predictor of oral proficiency among novice learners was sociolinguistic competence and fluency, while grammatical competence and fluency were the strongest predictors for advanced learners. The results suggest the need for a separate assessment tool for different proficiency levels and the need for a different focus in the classroom depending on the learners' proficiency level.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.235-251
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• 2001

According to Chomskyan grammar, humans can generate and understand an unbounded number of grammatical sentences. Against the background of pure and idealized linguistic competence, this linguistic productivity is argued and understood. In actual utterances, however, there are many limitations of productivity but they are said to come from the general constraints on performances such as capacity of short term memory or attention. In this paper I discuss a problem raised against idealized productivity. I argue that linguistic productivity idealizes our linguistic competence too much. By separating idealized competence from the various constraints of performance, Chomskyan theorists can argue for unlimited productivity. However, the absolute distinction between grammar (pure competence) and parser (actual psychological processes) makes little sense when we explain the low acceptability(intelligibility) of center embedded sentences. Usually, the problem of center embedded sentence is explained in terms of memory shortage or other performance constraints. To explain the low acceptability, however, we need to assume specialized memory structure because the low acceptability occurs only with a specific type of syntactic pattern. 1 argue that this special memory structure should not be considered as a general performance constraint. It is a domain specific (specifically linguistic) constraints and an intrinsic part of human language processing. Recent development of Chomskyan grammar, i.e., minimalist approach seems to close the gap between pure competence and this type of specialized constraints. Chomsky's earlier approach of generative grammar focuses on end result of the generative derivation. However, economy principle (of minimalist approach) focuses on actual derivational processes. By having less mathematical or less idealized grammar, we can come closer to the actual computational processes that build syntactic structure of a sentence. In this way, we can have a more concrete picture of our linguistic competence, competence that is not detached from actual computational processes.