• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.49-77
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• 2005

This paper has an aim to examine English native speakers' requests, and offer an instructional technique to develop EFL students' pragmatic ability. For this purpose, English-speaking native speakers' requests were collected in six different face-threatening situations, and analyzed in three ways: directness levels, internal modification and sequence of request. The analysis of requests showed that they were realized mainly through conventionally indirect level in most situations, were internally modified frequently through the use of downgraders, and had a certain sequence of utterances realizing a request. On the basis of these findings, two kinds of interactional activities (Jigsaw and pair work) were provided as sample activities to promote EFL students' pragmatic knowledge about the appropriate ways of making requests given the fact that pragmatic errors can be more serious and more problematic than grammatical errors in social interaction.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.67-88
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• 2004

Given the noteworthy increase in the number of native-born English-speaking. EFL instructors teaching overseas, this research examined 6 American EFL instructors who had taught English abroad with special reference to their experience as foreigner instructors in their respective host countries. With the use of interviews as the major technique employed, this research was centered on identifying conflicts or difficulties the research participants encountered as novice instructors, both internal and external to the classroom settings of their host countries. Research findings revealed that the current participants were not adequately prepared to cope with new and unfamiliar physical settings of their host countries, or to familiarize themselves with their new classroom settings and students. Studying the various the conflicts which native EFL instructors encountered, both internal and external to the classroom environment, will hopefully shed light on, and provide a more accurate portrayal of EFL professionals' teaching overseas and may provide possible insights into potential solutions to them. Furthermore, the research findings were considered and discussed in terms of acculturation theory.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.51-66
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• 2001

This paper compares different uses of downgraders by Korean English speakers (KES) with those by American English native speakers (AENS) in their requestive e-mail. Three different situations in which social power and distance were controlled were set up to examine and compare the participants' politeness strategies in requestive e-mail. It was found that the KESs' use of downgraders appeared differently from the AENSs' use qualitatively and quantitatively across three situations. The AENSs used downgraders almost three times as more, resulting in a much more mitigated and polite effect in requests. The AENSs' requests were mostly modified by syntactic modifiers, such as aspect, tense, conditional, and consultative devices. On the other hand, the KESs' requests were modified mostly by politeness markers and conditionals in a limited number of requests.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.119-139
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper was to examine various aspects of meaning negotiation process in online chatting. Korean college students were asked to engage in chatting on the Internet over the course of a semester-long period, and chatting transcripts were analyzed in terms of sources of communication breakdown, signals to indicate communication breakdown, strategies to overcome communication breakdown, and ways of closing meaning negotiation. According to the findings of the study, lack of background knowledge and incoherent string of sentences in text were two major barriers creating communication problems. Subjects were able to use signals to indicate their communication difficulties, and overcome them by using different strategies. In doing so, however, they were found to suffer a narrow range of signals and strategies, which showed their limited communicative ability in the management of interaction, and indicated a clear, strong need for an extension of discourse and strategic competences of Korean students for more effective and smoother transition of message in everyday interaction.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.121-150
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• 2009

This paper deals with contrastive analysis and interlanguage with respect to adjective ordering. It aimed to investigate how similar and different the orders of descriptive adjectives are in English and Korean, and how Korean EFL learners perceive the sequences of English descriptive adjectives. Data were collected from native English speakers and native Korean speakers and Korean EFL learners. The contrastive analysis showed that the order of English adjectives was size, opinion, condition, age, color, shape, material, and origin, whereas the Korean order was condition, age, opinion, color, size, shape, material, and origin. The relative order of the interlanguage was shown to be age, size, opinion, shape, condition, color, origin, and material, with the exceptions of the order of condition preceding age and that of size being the same position as condition. The interlanguage data manifested different aspects of ordering when compared with English and Korean: Some adjective combinations were similar to both English and Korean; Some were different from English or Korean; Some were different from both English and Korean. These ordering patterns are discussed in terms of such principles as the nouniness principle, the subjectivity/objectivity principle, the iconic principle, etc. On the basis of these results, some helpful suggestions are made.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.151-176
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• 2003

Motivation and learning strategies, some of the important factors affecting language learning, have mostly been studied with reference to their relationship in terms of proficiency. This study investigated motivation and learning strategies and their relationship in order to find the inward predisposition of learners. Data was collected from 200 university students in Taejon and Chungnam province, Korea language learning strategies were measured by the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning(SILL), and motivation by the Attitude / Motivation Test Battery(AMTB), with adaptations for Koreans. The detailed analysis of the data Indicated that Korean university students were more motivated to learn English for a practical goal than a formal one. They had a strong willingness to learn but showed 'the tendency of the new generation' of choosing the easiest and most convenient ways in studying English in terms of motivational intensity and strategy use. Findings imply that there have to be some changes and improvements in the deep-rooted classroom teaching methods. A systematic device is needed to induce students to be autonomous learners, providing them with a variety of activities suitable for their purposes and levels, as in opportunities of contacting native speakers, multi-media language labs, the Internet etc.

• 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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.37-54
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• 2009

This study investigated vocabulary learning strategies used by EFL middle school learners in Korea and examined the relationship between the middle school learners' vocabulary learning strategy (VLS) use and their vocabulary proficiency level. One hundred and forty-one students in a public middle school participated in the study and the data for this study were collected from a vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire and a vocabulary proficiency test. Based on the result of the vocabulary proficiency test, the participants were divided into three proficiency groups: high-, mid- and low- level proficiency groups. The overall findings of the study revealed that the participants used cognitive strategies most frequently and social strategies least frequently. The most frequently used individual strategies were 'using a bilingual dictionary,' 'studying the sound of a word' and 'practicing words through verbal repetition.' The least frequently used ones were 'interacting with native speakers' and 'studying or practicing the meaning of a word in a group.' The research results also showed that the vocabulary proficiency level has a significant influence on the vocabulary strategy use. The more proficient learners used vocabulary learning strategies more actively. More specifically, the high proficiency level group used metacognitive strategies the most. The middle and low proficiency groups used cognitive strategies the most. It is suggested that language teachers should facilitate the vocabulary learning process by helping learners develop appropriate strategies.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.193-206
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• 2011

The purpose of the study is to examine the use of emotion vocabulary by Korean English learners. Three basic emotion fields, pleasure, anger, and fear were selected to elicit the participants' responses. L1 English speakers' data was also collected for comparison. The major results are as follows. First, English learners responded with various inappropriate verb forms like I feel~, I am~ while the majority of English native speaking teachers responded with subjunctive forms like I would feel~. In addition, L2 English learners used mostly simple and coordination sentences. Second, the lexical richness, measured through type/token ratio, was higher in English L1 data than in English L2 data. The proportion of emotion lemmas reflects the lexical richness or the diversity of the emotion words. Lastly, L2 English learners' responses focused on a few typical adjectives like happy, angry and scared. This structural and semantic distinctiveness of Korean English learners' emotion words was discussed from pedagogical perspectives.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.211-231
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• 2003

The study of English words in terms of etymology has a long history, going back over 110 years since Murray et al. (1884). Scholars have therefore had lots of time to gather all kind of information on the origin of English words. In fact, Modern English is the product of a long and complex process of historical developments from a great diversity of sources. The origins and development of English words meaning ‘a vessel for washing, a bath or a toilet’ are traced from Old English to the twentieth century in this paper in terms of the semantic and/or conceptual categories of the words with their particular senses. We conclude this paper with a brief discussion of how the teaching of English words can give some feedback to both teachers and students under the circumstances of English education in Korea and/or how we come to a better understanding of this charming field of English etymology in its own right.