• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.35-70
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• 2003

This study investigates the acquisition of English prepositions of location and direction by Malaysian Chinese ESL learners. It was conducted with the objective of finding out which of the two types of prepositions was more problematic to the L1 Chinese learners. The study also sought to investigate the effect of age and proficiency levels in English on the acquisition of the English prepositions of location and direction by these learners. Additionally, the study sets out to determine the extent to which the L1 Chinese learners have acquired the English prepositions of location and direction. This study involved three groups of Chinese ESL learners: elementary, intermediate and advanced. They were selected based on their age and their performance on a standardized proficiency test. The instrument used to collect data was a preposition test comprising 85 items. These items on prepositions of location and direction were randomly arranged in the tasks. The test required subjects to respond to multiple choice questions, match given sentences with appropriate prepositions, fill in blanks with the appropriate prepositions, judge given sentences to see if they are grammatical or ungrammatical and correct the ungrammatical sentence by providing the appropriate prepositions. The results indicate that age and proficiency levels of the learners made a difference in the acquisition of English prepositions of location and direction. The older learners with higher proficiency levels seem to fare better than the younger and less proficient learners. The results suggest that the prepositions of location arc slightly more problematic than prepositions of directions to the L1 Chinese learners. Our data also suggest that certain prepositions of each type are more problematic than others.

• Proceedings of the PSK Conference
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.396.2-396.2
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• 2002

Analytical results during the proficiency test managed by Kyungin Regional Korea Food ＆ Drug Administration were proposed to be influenced by several factors. Data of several factors were collected along with the test results with ibuprofen and sobrerol formulations. The collected data were the use of internal standard, academic background and career of analytical personnel, production size of the company and location of the participating laboratory. (omitted)

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.225-238
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the instruction with question-creation training, compared with traditional science instructions. The instruction with question-creation training is to give students chances to make questions by themselves based on what they learned before the end of the classes. The four effects of the instruction were studied: students' achievement, metacognition, self-efficacy, and the level of the questions created by the students according to different proficiency levels. Research data was gathered from 65 second grade students at a middle school in Busan. The comparative group was instructed in traditional lecture-type teaching method. The experimental group was instructed with questioncreation training. Students in the experimental group were asked to make 3 questions by themselves and then, to solve their peers' questions about 15 minutes before the end of the classes. Both groups were divided into 3 groups by proficiency level according to the results of last semester's science test. Before the research, a metacognition test and a self-efficacy test were conducted. After the research, an achievement test, a question level test, a metacognition test, and a self-efficacy test were conducted and analyzed by t-test. The research data for question level was analyzed by one-way ANCOVA. The results of this study revealed that question-creation training has a positive effect on student's achievement, metacognition, and self-efficiency. It also showed most of the students have gained an ability to make higher-level questions regardless of their proficiency level due to the increased number of students who made higher-level questions. It also showed that most of the students could gain an ability to make higher-level questions regardless of their proficiency level from the fact that the number of students who made higher-level questions increased in every proficiency level.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1-22
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• 2007

The study examined the effects of explicit derivational morphology instruction (henceforth DMI) on the incidental vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension of 132 Korean 1st-year high school students who responded to a battery of tests (two vocabulary tests and a reading comprehension test). Multiple statistical tools were used to analyze the data: Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Simple Regression Analysis, Tests of Simple Main Effects, and effect size computation using Cohen's d. The results indicated that (a) DMI enhanced students' ability to infer word meanings in context, (b) DMI promoted high proficiency students' reading comprehension, whereas it impeded intermediate proficiency students' reading comprehension, (c) vocabulary knowledge has a strong positive predictive value for reading comprehension, and (d) the gaps of vocabulary knowledge across proficiency levels were still substantial, despite the observation that DMI promoted students' vocabulary acquisition. These results have a bearing on English as Foreign Language (EFL) reading pedagogy.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
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• 2011.11a
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• pp.77-78
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• 2011

This paper presents a basic study which is to develop concrete cylinder moulds for a proficiency testing compressive strength of concrete among laboratories accredited Korea Laboratory Accreditation Scheme(KOLAS). The concrete cylinder moulds sufficiently have homogeneity for a proficiency testing which is a means of assessing the ability of laboratories to competently perform specific test and measurements. The concrete compressive strength specimens placed different consolidation methods were analyzed by a statistic technique. The methods of consolidation are rodding, and internal or external vibration.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.20
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• pp.29-66
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• 2010

This paper is a qualitative study of the experiences of Korean heritage language learners (KHLLs) with literacy (reading and writing), particularly before they enter the college-level heritage language classroom. Previous research, both qualitative and quantitative, has addressed the overall language background of KHLLs, including oral and aural proficiency and writing and reading ability, as well as demographic information (such as when the student immigrated to the United States) in relation to language test scores. This study addresses KHLL experiences in the following six areas as they relate to student perceptions and attitudes toward their own heritage language literacy: language proficiency, motivation for learning, academic preparedness, cultural connectedness, emotional factors, and social factors. Fourteen undergraduate students at a university in the western United States participated in a convenience sample by responding to a 10-question survey. Trends in responses indicated that KHLLs entered the classroom with high integrational motivation and experienced great satisfaction with perceived progress in literacy, but students also expressed regret for having missed childhood learning experiences that would likely have resulted in higher proficiency. These experiences include informal and formal instruction in the home and formal instruction outside of the home.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.11-17
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• 2024

The goal of the current study is to investigate whether L2 learners' perceptual ability regarding epenthetic vowels is interconnected with other aspects of speech recognition, such as lexical stress, sentence focus, and vowel recognition. Twenty-five Korean L2 learners of English participated in perception experiments assessing vowel epenthesis oddity, lexical stress oddity, sentence focus oddity, and vowel identification. Results indicate that accuracy on the vowel epenthesis oddity test is influenced by both lexical stress and sentence focus, suggesting that perceptual ability regarding epenthetic vowels is influenced by the acquisition of L2 rhythmic structure at both word and sentence levels. Additionally, this study identifies a proficiency effect on vowel epenthesis recognition, implying that the influence of L1 phonotactics diminishes as L2 proficiency increases. Taken together, this study illustrates the interaction between perceptual abilities in vowel epenthesis and prosodic stress in the field of L2 speech perception.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 2002.05a
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• pp.419.2-419
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• 2002

• The Monthly Technology and Standards
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• s.7
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• pp.92-102
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• 2002

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.37
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• pp.335-360
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether high-level(level 6) essay-writing questions in Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) have been presented appropriately so as to enable foreign test-takers to display their Korean writing ability properly, and to provide some suggestions on how those questions need to be changed. To accomplish this purpose, all the essay-writing questions were collected from the 33 TOPIK tests, from the 2nd in 1998 to the 35thin 2014, and analyzed from the perspectives of their topics and formats. The results are that high-level TOPIK essay-writing questions showed a strong tendency to take as their topics Korean sociocultural structures and phenomena, or current issues in Korea, and that they frequently employed guided writing formats by providing preset ideas or/and contexts for test-takers to write in a guided way; such tendencies were analyzed to shed a negative influence on test-takers displaying their writing ability and creativity, because those topics and preset ideas or contexts provided do not allow them to express their own opinions or positions freely. It is suggested that TOPIK essay-writing questions should be changed to deal with objective and general topics which enable test-takers to write freely and logically in Korean based on their experience, because TOPIK is not a test to check whether they have enough background knowledge about the Korean society and culture, but a test to assess their Korean proficiency.