Grammar Errors in Korean EFL Learners’ TOEIC Speaking Test

The purpose of the present study was to explore the role of morphological awareness in reading comprehension in different language learning contexts (ESL and EFL). Korean ESL and Korean EFL learners (50 and 257 respectively) in grades five and six were administered measures of L2 (English) morphological, phonological, and orthographic awareness (MA, PA, and OA), as well as reading comprehension. The participants’ L1 (Korean) MA was also measured. The multiple-group path analysis showed that among both group participants’ L2 MA was the greatest predictor for their L2 reading comprehension, when the effect of PA and OA was controlled (within-linguistic perspective). Concerning cross-linguistic perspective, there was a statistically significant difference between the ESL and the EFL groups: the ESL participants’ L1 MA played a positive role in predicting their L2 reading comprehension, but not for their EFL counterparts. Educational implications and research recommendations are discussed in relation to MA’s contribution to reading comprehension.

Both Native English-Speaking Teachers (NESTs) and Non-Native English-Speaking Teachers (NNESTs) may have advantages as writing instructors, yet little is known about how they actually influence writing in EFL contexts like South Korea. To address this issue, 76 high proficiency Korean EFL university students from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) were separated into a group that received extensive native English speaker instruction (n = 57) and a group that did not (n = 19) using a self-survey. Analysis of essay content revealed that words used by Korean EFL writers with more NEST instruction are similar in difficulty and variety to native English writers. Concerning style, Korean EFL learners with more NEST instruction used stances to evaluate, validate, and state personal opinions, while learners with less NEST instruction used speech formulas and more unbiased logical arguments. Regarding grammar, Korean EFL learners with extensive NEST instruction used more sophisticated vocabulary, word forms, and verb tenses to create a novel argument using personal experience, whereas Korean EFL learners with low NEST instruction tended to use formulaic and logical arguments with more accuracy. Overall, results suggest that NEST instruction in Korea promotes more creativity and sophistication in composition, while NNEST instruction encourages more accurate use of language. In accordance with the findings, curricula or teacher training may be developed to ensure that each type of instruction shares the strengths of its counterpart.

The present study examines the use of especially and its synonyms, particularly, specially, specifically, and in particular, in Chinese and Korean EFL learners` writing in comparison with native English speakers` use and then investigates the relationship between English textbooks and learners` language use. To do this, a Chinese learner corpus, a Korean learner corpus, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) were utilized. Furthermore, widely used middle and high school English textbooks from China and Korea were scrutinized. It was found that especially and particularly were the only of the studied synonyms from the COCA that occurred with comparable frequency, the rest appearing much less frequently. Chinese and Korean EFL learners overused especially and underused particularly compared to native speakers. The earlier introduction and more frequent occurrence of especially than particularly in textbooks could possibly influence EFL learners` selection of the former over the latter. Chinese and Korean EFL learners tended to put especially and particularly in the sentence-initial position functioning as a sentence modifier, while native speakers by and large employed them in sentence-medial position functioning as a modifier of an adjective. The collocates of especially and particularly in Chinese and Korean EFL learners` texts were mostly nouns, whereas adjectives were the most common collocates in native speakers` texts. Some implications of the findings are also discussed.

This study seeks to explore the discrepancies in grammatical judgments between native English speakers and Korean EFL learners when it comes to definite and indefinite NPs in existential there-constructions (ETCs). The experimental results indicate that Korean EFL learners do not exhibit the definiteness effect observed in native speakers. In the experiment, while native English speakers consistently distinguished between definite and indefinite NPs in ETCs, Korean EFL learners displayed varied grammatical judgments, especially concerning definite NPs. Diesing’s (1992) mapping hypothesis provides the theoretical foundation for the constraint that definite NPs are not allowed in ETCs. According to her theory, indefinite NPs simply introduce variables rather than bearing quantificational force on their own, and these variables are bound by existential closure in the domain vP, yielding an existential reading.

This paper presents the relationship between Korean EFL learners’ self-reporting learning style preferences and their perspectives on ELT materials evaluation. Quantitative data was acquired from 521 subjects’ responses to a learning style survey and a questionnaire of materials evaluation checklist. The findings show that Korean EFL learners’ major (salient) learning styles were likely to affect their views of materials evaluation. That is, learners with multiple major learning styles and with tactile or kinesthetic learning styles tended to have higher levels of expectation concerning materials evaluation. Also, they tended to be significantly concerned with the criteria relevant to their major learning styles. This suggests that learning style can be a referential indicator for the selection of learner-appropriate ELT materials. Teachers can utilize information about their students’ perspectives on materials evaluation relative to learning styles to facilitate materials selection or adaptation, and to develop teaching methods with consideration of individual learners’ preferences. The implications of the study will be discussed.

Foreign language learners often have limited opportunity to interact with people from the target culture and develop their intercultural competence (IC) through those interactions both inside and outside of the classroom.To identify a new opportunity to engage Korean EFL learners in innovative ways to maximize target language interactions and develop their IC, this study adopts Facebook as a new computer-mediated communication (CMC) tool in a university classroom-based telecollaborative project between the U.S. and South Korea.The results revealed that Facebook offers Korean EFL learners an effective platform for intercultural interactions with people from the target culture, and Korean EFL learners demonstrate the abilities of the overall components of IC by showing many instances that fall well within Byram's (2000) assessment criteria, although some conflicting results exist.This study suggests that the adoption of Facebook is a new, innovative, and practical way to facilitate effective intercultural interactions as well as promote IC in the EFL classroom.

Korean EFL Learners’ Attitudes toward the Use of CALL and Their Motivations for Learning English in Korea

Korean EFL Learners’ Written Vocabulary Development: Writing Task and Learner Proficiency

The present study explores L2 writers’ strategy use during writing with a smartphone dictionary app based on the think-aloud method. Two groups of Korean EFL students carried out four writing tasks: one group performed writing with the help of a dictionary app and the other did not. Results revealed that the students with dictionary aid processed writing quite differently from the ones without it. Less L2 writing anxiety, more attention to the content of writing and more active idea materialization was detected in the former group. The analysis of think-aloud data indicated that these results were mainly caused by the extension of the students’ vocabulary knowledge capacity with dictionary aid, which contributed to enhancing the confidence in their writing ability. The findings suggest that using a dictionary app in a language class could enable L2 students to perform writing more intensively by reducing anxiety.

Korean EFL Learners’ Depth of Meaning of Highly Frequent Words

한국인 영어학습자의 세계영어에 대한 인식: YouTube 영어수업 영상 및 댓글분석을 중심으로

The purpose of this research was to find out the relation between Korean learners’ English proficiency and the ratio of the length of the stressed vowel in a monosyllabic noun to that of the unstressed vowel in an article of the noun phrases (e.g., “a cup”, “the bus”, etcs.). Generally, the vowels in monosyllabic content words are phonetically more prominent than the ones in monosyllabic function words as the former have phrasal stress, making the vowels in content words longer in length, higher in pitch, and louder in amplitude. This study, based on the speech samples from Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC) and Rated Korean-Spoken English Corpus (Rated K-SEC), examined 879 English noun phrases, which are composed of an article and a monosyllabic noun, from sentences which are rated on 4 levels of proficiency. The lengths of the vowels in these 879 target NPs were measured and the ratio of the vowel lengths in nouns to those in articles was calculated. It turned out that the higher the proficiency level, the greater the mean ratio of the vowels in nouns to the vowels in articles, confirming the research’s hypothesis. This research thus concluded that for the Korean English learners, the higher the English proficiency level, the better they could produce the stressed and unstressed vowels with more conspicuous length differences between them.

The current study aimed to investigate the influence of L1 on the processing of L2 collocations utilizing a phrase-acceptability judgement task. The task was conducted on 39 English collocations with 19 native speakers of English and 45 Korean EFL learners. Their error rates and reaction times were measured both on the congruent collocations that have L1 translation equivalents and the incongruent collocations that do not have ones. It was found that the advanced EFL learners responded significantly faster to and made fewer errors on both the congruent and the incongruent collocations than the intermediate EFL learners. Meanwhile, both the advanced and the intermediate EFL learners made significantly more errors and responded slower under incongruent condition, indicating a strong congruency effect. The results implied that there exists a high degree of reliance on L1 intralexical knowledge in processing L2 collocations by the EFL learners, and acquiring incongruent L2 collocations seems still challenging even to the advanced learners. However, it was also suggested that once EFL learners notice incongruent collocations as valid ones and store them in their L2 mental lexicon, they may be able to processing incongruent collocations as efficiently as native speakers, directly linking L2 collocation forms to their concepts independently of L1 mediation. (Hanyang University)

This study aimed to examine the role played by the depth of vocabulary knowledge in the reading comprehension process of Korean EFL learners within the framework of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). In addition to the two major SVR components, decoding and linguistic comprehension of English words, vocabulary depth, was added to the model to see whether it exerted any additional influence on the reading comprehension of Korean high school EFL learners. A total of 207 11th grade high school students in South Korea participated in this study by taking vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth (analogy, antonym, and synonym), listening comprehension, decoding, and reading comprehension tests. The results were analyzed through structural equation modeling. The findings indicated that when vocabulary depth was considered in the SVR framework, it accounted for a unique and independent variance occurring in reading comprehension while controlling for oral language and decoding skills. In addition, direct effects of vocabulary depth on L2 reading comprehension and decoding abilities were observed, with a strong positive correlation between vocabulary depth and oral comprehension abilities. This study discusses the pedagogical implications for promoting depth of vocabulary knowledge in the Korean English-learning context.

This study investigated the types of errors in the essay writing of college students at the elementary level. A total of sixty-four data were collected from thirty-five college students at the elementary level who took a general English course. Dulay et al. (1982)’s surface strategy taxonomy was adopted for the analysis and the students’ errors were categorized into four parts, such as omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. Results showed that the frequency of errors from misformation was the highest (51%), followed by omission (32.95%), misordering (10.71%), and addition (4.76%). In more detail, tense errors were revealed most frequently, followed by word choice. In particular, errors in the use of articles and prepositions occurred in various forms, which are construed as a result of a language system that does not exist in the mother tongue. The students in this study committed various grammatical errors at the sentence level as well as showed a lack of general knowledge about writing. It suggests that second language learners should be taught not only linguistic knowledge but also the strategy to improve writing skills.