• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.105-115
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• 2003

The four skills of a language are basically required for a communication. They are very important for a learner to develop the balanced language acquisition. Today both listening and speaking skills are emphasized in the global era rather than reading and writing proficiencies. The reason is really why the learners' communicative competence is more needed than the accurate knowledge of a structure in the language. For this reason, the listening comprehension should be taught effectively using the following strategies. First, the sound difference of a language must be taught. Language is a complicated process to convey the comprehensive meaning combined with the internal and external factors of a language. In other words, the meaning for the sound of language should be transmitted by the unit of vocabulary and syntax. Second, a good listening comprehension requires the familiarity and much experience with a lot of English words to understand English sentences unconsciously. Third, as understanding the structure of language is effective for the listening comprehension, the better listening comprehension can be possible through the meaningful exercise. Fourth, the compound process of listening comprehension requires the comprehensive understanding of language, but not the separate understanding of language. Fifth, the appropriate application of the multimedia courseware helps improve the listening comprehension better than that of the existing audio, video, tape recorder and so on. Using multimedia courseware is useful as follows: A learner is able to take as much lesson as he/she wants. It does take little time to repeat about what he/she takes a lesson. It gives the lively picture with the native speakers' voices. It gives him/her(a learner) a feedback effect continuously through the interaction of computer. It controls his/her lesson in accordance with the level of a learner.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.1-24
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• 2006

This study investigated differences in beliefs about English learning of 286 EFL college students and 52 English teachers in Korea. Data was collected using Horwitz's Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory and compared between students and teachers in beliefs. To address the research questions, the data were analyzed through descriptive statistics including frequencies, factor analysis, MANOVA, ANOVA, t-test, and reliability coefficients. The results showed four factors in student beliefs: Difficulty of learning English, nature of learning English, importance of correctness in learning English, and motivation and perceived importance of learning English. Clear differences were found in students and teachers' beliefs in English learning aptitude and importance of translation, error correction, and grammar rules. A few belief differences were also identified between Koreans and native-speaking English teachers related to the importance of vocabulary learning, pronunciation, and cultural knowledge. The findings of the study indicated that background variables such as gender and major field of study have an effect on student beliefs about L2 learning. The present study also provided pedagogical considerations to reduce mismatch between students and teachers beliefs and to improve the L2 planning and instruction.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.123-142
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• 2009

The present study used multi-faceted Rasch measurement to explore the characteristics and bias patterns of non-native raters when they scored L2 writing tasks. Three raters scored 254 writing tasks written by Korean university students on two topics adapted from the TOEFL Test of Written English (TWE). The written products were assessed using a five-category rating scale (Content, Organization, Language in Use, Grammar, and Mechanics). The raters only showed a difference in severity with regard to rating categories but not in task types. Overall, the raters scored Grammar most harshly and Organization most leniently. The results also indicated several bias patterns of ratings with regard to the rating categories and task types. In rater-task bias interactions, each rater showed recurring bias patterns in their rating between two writing tasks. Analysis of rater-category bias interaction showed that the three raters revealed biased patterns across all the rating categories though they were relatively consistent in their rating. The study has implications for the importance of rater training and task selection in L2 writing assessment.

• MALSORI
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• no.57
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• pp.59-72
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• 2006

The purpose of this study was to see whether Korean-English bilinguals' semantic systems of Korean and English are shared or separated between the two languages. In a series of picture-word interference tasks, participants were required to name the pictures in Korean or in English with distractor words printed either in Korean or English. The distractor words were any of identical, semantically related, or neutral to the picture. The response time of naming was facilitated when distractor words were semantically identical for both same- and different-language pairs. But this facilitation effect was stronger when naming was produced in their native language, which in this case was Korean. Also, inhibitory effect was found when the picture and its distractor word were semantically related in both same- and different-language paired conditions. From these results it can be concluded that semantic representations of Korean and English may not be entirely but partly overlapping in bilinguals.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.41-52
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• 2007

Recent experimental studies have shown that language-users' knowledge of the statistical characteristic of their native language plays a key role in their task performance. One specific instance of this that the current study focuses on is the effect of phonotactic probabilities on speakers' wordlikeness judgment of nonwords. In this paper, I explore the question of whether the judgment of Korean speaking subjects as to the wordlikeness of Korean nonsense words is influenced by the degree of association between two-phoneme sequences in Korean. The current results suggest that the objective measure of correlations (expressed by $r_{\phi}$ values) between an onset consonant and a vowel inside Korean syllables play an important role in Korean speakers' nonword processing. The current results additionally indicate an effect of the correlations of two-phoneme sequences including vowels and coda consonants on nonword processing. Implications of these findings for Korean speakers' learning the correlations between adjacent segments inside the syllable are discussed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.7-24
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• 1999

Eleven Korean learners of English took part in an experiment where the production and perception of English /r/ and /l/ in four different word positions was investigated. Overall the subjects made more errors on /l/ in both production and identification tests. The frequency of the subjects' errors was also sensitive to word positions in which the two English liquids occur. Especially the subjects made noticeably fewer errors in intervocalic medial position. It is suggested that the Korean subjects' acquisitional pattern in this particular case of foreign phone learning can be explained more by language particular 'interference' effects rather than 'universal' acoustic arguments such as those given in Dissosway et a1. (1982) and Sheldon and Strange (1982). The results of the experiment also support the minority position among second language educators that in some cases of non-native phone acquisition, learners' production abilities can be developed earlier than their perceptual abilities.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.83-88
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• 2003

This study carried out an experimental English pronunciation assessment to see the differences in the relationship between the different rater categories. The result shows that i) correlation between Korean and Native American raters is high(r=.98) enough to be considered reliable, ii) previous instructions about assessment rubric and the knowledge about English phonetics and phonology exert little influence on the rating scores, iii) correlation between the automatic ILT(Interactive Language Tutor) rating using speech recognition technology and Natives' rating is stronger than that between ILT and Koreans' rating.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.19-40
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• 2006

This paper deals with a part-specific analysis of grammatical errors in the production of the English passive in writing. The purpose of the study is dual: to explore common error types in forming the passive; and to provide plausible sources of the errors, with special attention to the role of the native language. To this end, this study obtained a large amount of data from Korean EFL university students using an essay writing task. The results show that in forming the passive sentence, errors were made in various ways and that the most common problem was the formation of the be-auxiliary, in particular, the proper use of tense and S-V agreement. Another important finding was that the global errors found in this study were not necessarily those with the greatest frequency. Also corroborated was the general claim that many factors work together to account for errors. In many cases, interlingual and intralingual factors were shown to interact with each other to explain the passive errors made by Korean students. On the basis of the results, suggestions are made for effective and well-formed use of the passive sentence.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.241-254
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• 2000

The past decade has witnessed the abundant use of computer in testing language skills such as listening and reading. Compared with these language skills, we have experienced little use of computer in testing a speaking skill including pronunciation. This is largely due to limitations of the current computer technology. One of such limitations for testing pronunciation is to store and automatically evaluate what the learner utters. Due to this limitation, the computer simply stores what the learner utters and raters evaluate it afterward on a certain rating continuum. With the advent of voice recognition technology, however, the computer has been able to test pronunciation in a systematic way. This technology enables the computer to identify, visually show, and evaluate the learner's intonation pattern by means of autocorrection. The evaluation is expressed in terms of the degree in which the learner's intonation pattern overlaps with that of the native speaker of the target language. In particular, the degree is numerically displayed on the screen, and this numeral is considered as the score of the learner's utterance under our testing framework.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.123-147
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• 2002

As far as the recent ELT research concerned, it seems to have been no hot ‘theoretical’ issues, but ‘practical’ ones in general: e.g., learners and learning, components of proficiency, correlates of L2 learning, etc. This paper focuses on the theme given above, with a special reference to the sub-title: specifically, 1) World English, world Englishes and world's lingua franca; 2) ENL, ESL and EFL; 3) Grammars, style manuals, dictionaries and media; 4) Pronunciation models: RP, BBC model and General American, Network Standard; 5) Lexical, grammatical variations and discourse grammars; 6) Beliefs and subjective theories in foreign language research; 7) Dilemma among radical, canonical and eclectic views. In conclusion, the author offers a modest proposal: we need to appeal to our own experience, intention, feeling and purpose, that is, our identity to express “our own selves” in our contexts toward the world anywhere, if not sounding authentic enough, but producing it plausibly well. It is time for us (with our ethno-cultural autonomy) to need to be complementary to and parallel with its native speakers' linguistic-cultural authenticity in terms of the broadest mutual understanding.