• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.337-366
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• 2017

This study examines the acquisition of the multiple semantic functions of the Korean adverbial particle -ey by L1 American English learners of Korean as a second language at U.S. institutions. Participants at beginning, intermediate, and advanced proficiency levels (N = 45) were tested on the ability to interpret and produce five of the meanings of -ey, which they had been taught in formal classroom settings in the first semester of their Korean language learning. The results show different developmental trajectories for the particle's different semantic functions. The findings of a statistical analysis indicate that the beginning and intermediate proficiency learners had largely acquired the time, goal, and stative location meanings, but not the contact and unit meanings; the advanced learners demonstrated acquisition of all except for the unit meaning. The study suggests that in addition to factors such as semantic complexity and cross-linguistic influence, several other factors including L2 frequency, the availability of linguistic input, and instructional method also contribute to the acquisition of -ey.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.39-62
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• 2017

This study is to examine grammar understanding with beginner English speakers according to presentational methods of grammatical content. 18 English-speaking Korean beginners were randomly assigned and divided into two groups. We first examined if there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups in grammar comprehension with and without illustrations. It was found that the group given the presentation illustrations showed greater understanding than the group without them. Second, no statistically significant difference in grammar understanding was found between the groups with and without materials marked for their awareness. Third, no statistically significant difference was found between the groups with the order of presenting content elements related to grammatical items. This study is to affirm the importance of illustrations as a component of Korean textbooks.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 2011.10a
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• pp.25-29
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• 2011

영어 논술 자동 평가 시스템은 수험자가 쓴 에세이에 대하여 전문 평가자가 직접 읽고 평가하는 방식에서 벗어나 웹상에서 자동으로 평가 받을 수 있는 실시간 시스템이다. 하지만 비영어권 수험자에게는 논리력 혹은 작문 능력보다 그것을 영어로 표현하는 유창성에서 더 큰 문제가 있을 수 있는데 기존 연구에서는 이런 측면에 대한 평가가 부족하였다. 본 연구에서는 보다 정확한 비영어권 수험자의 영어 논술 평가를 위해 어휘력, 문장 구조의 다양성, 문장의 혼잡도를 평가하여 언어 유창성에 집중된 기계학습 방법의 추가적인 자질을 제안한다. 실험 결과 전문 평가자의 점수와 1) 상관관계 2) 정확도 측면에서 제안하는 방법은 기존의 방법에 비해 더 나은 성능을 보였다.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2018

This paper investigates how adult Mandarin- and English- speaking learners of Korean perceive Korean vowels, with focus on the effect of the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) acoustic relationship, as well as the influence of Korean language experience. For this study, native Mandarin and Canadian English speakers who have learned Korean as a foreign language, as well as a control group of native Korean speakers, participated in two experiments. Experiment 1 was designed to examine acoustic similarities between Korean and English vowels, as well as Korean and Mandarin vowels to predict which Korean vowels are relatively easy, or difficult for L2 learners to perceive. The linear discriminant analysis (Klecka, 1980) based on their L1-L2 acoustic similarity predicted that L2 Mandarin learners would have perceptual difficulty rankings for Korean vowels as follows: (the easiest) /i, a, e/ >> /ɨ, ʌ, o, u/ (most difficult), whereas L2 English learners would have perceptual difficulty rankings for Korean vowels as follows: (the easiest) /i, a, e, ɨ, ʌ/ >> /o, u/ (most difficult). The goal of Experiment 2 was to test how accurately L2 Mandarin and English learners perceive Korean vowels /ɨ, ʌ, o, u/ which are considered to be difficult for L2 learners. The results of a mixed-effects logistic model revealed that English listeners showed higher identification accuracy for Korean vowels than Mandarin listeners, indicating that having a larger L1 vowel inventory than the L2 facilitates L2 vowel perception. However, both groups have the same ranking of Korean vowel perceptual difficulty: ɨ > ʌ > u > o. This finding indicates that adult learners of Korean can perceive the new vowel /ɨ/, which does not exist in their L1, more accurately than the vowel /o/, which is acoustically similar to vowels in their L1, suggesting that L2 learners are more likely to establish additional phonetic categories for new vowels. In terms of the influence of experience with L2, it was found that identification accuracy increases as Korean language experience rises. In other words, the more experienced English and Mandarin learners of Korean are, the more likely they are to have better identification accuracy in Korean vowels than less experienced learners of Korean. Moreover, there is no interaction between L1 background and L2 experience, showing that identification accuracy of Korean vowels is higher as Korean language experience increases regardless of their L1 background. Overall, these findings of the two experiments demonstrated that acoustic similarity between L1 and L2 sounds using the LDA model can partially predict perceptual difficulty in L2 acquisition, indicating that other factors such as perceptual similarity between L1 and L2, the merge of Korean /o/ and /u/ may also influence their Korean vowel perception.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.1-27
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• 2014

This study investigates how common English hedge expressions such as 'I think' and 'I guess' appear in Korean, with the aim of providing explicit explanation for English-speaking leaners of Korean. Based on a contrastive analysis of spoken English and Korean corpus, this study argues three points: Firstly, 'I guess' appears with a wider variety of modalities in Korean than 'I think'. Secondly, this study has found that Korean textbooks contain inappropriate use of registers regarding the English translations of '-geot -gat-': although these markers are used in spoken Korean, they were translated into written English. Therefore, this study suggests that '-geot -gat-' be translated into 'I think' in spoken English, and into 'it seems' in the case of written English and narratives. Lastly, the contrastive analysis has shown that when 'I think' is used with deontic modalities such as 'I think I have to', Korean use '-a-ya-get-': the use of hedge marker 'I think' with 'I have to', which shows obligation or speaker's volition turns the deontic modalities into expressions of speaker's opinion.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.63-69
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• 2015

There are various researches which proposed an automatic instance generation from freetext on the web. Existing researches that focused on English, adopts pattern representation which is generated by simple rules and regular expression. These simple patterns achieves high performance, but it is not suitable in Korean due to differences of characteristics between Korean and English. Thus, this paper proposes a novel method for generating patterns and instances which focuses on Korean. A proposed method generates high quality patterns by taking advantages of dependency relations in a target sentences. In addition, a proposed method overcome restrictions from high degree of freedom of word order in Korean by utilizing postposition and it identifies a subject and an object more reliably. In experiment results, a proposed method shows higher precision than baseline and it is implies that proposed approache is suitable for self-knowledge learning system.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2012

The development of corpus in recent years has attracted increased research on spoken Korean. Nevertheless, these research outcomes are yet to be meaningfully and adequately reflected in Korean language textbooks. The reported speech marker '-dae' is one of these areas that need more attention. This study investigates whether or not in textbooks '-dae' is clearly explained to English-speaking learners to prevent confusion and misuse. Based on a contrastive analysis of Korean and English, this study argues three points: Firstly, '-dae' should be introduced to Korean learners as an independent sentence ender rather than a contracted form of '-dago hae'. Secondly, it is necessary to teach English-speaking learners that '-dae' is not equivalent to the English report speech form. It functions more or less as a third person marker in Korean. Learners should be informed that '-dae' is used for statements in English, if those statements were hearsay but the source of information does not need to be specified. This is a very distinctive difference between Korean and English and should be emphasized in class when 'dae' is taught. Thirdly, '-dae' should be introduced before indirect speech constructions, because it is mainly used in simple statements and the frequency of '-dae' is very high in spoken Korean.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.5 no.11
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• pp.527-534
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• 2016

The emergent information society requires the talent for creative thinking based on problem-solving skills and comprehensive thinking rather than simple memorization. Therefore, the Korean curriculum has also changed into the direction of the creative thinking through increasing short-answer questions that can determine the overall thinking of the students. However, their scoring results are a little bit inconsistency because scoring short-answer questions depends on the subjective scoring of human raters. In order to alleviate this point, an automated scoring system using a machine learning has been used as a scoring tool in overseas. Linguistically, Korean and English is totally different in the structure of the sentences. Thus, the automated scoring system used in English cannot be applied to Korean. In this paper, we introduce an automated scoring system for Korean short-answer questions using predictability and unanimity. We also verify the practicality of the automatic scoring system through the correlation coefficient between the results of the automated scoring system and those of human raters. In the experiment of this paper, the proposed system is evaluated for constructed-response items of Korean language, social studies, and science in the National Assessment of Educational Achievement. The analysis was used Pearson correlation coefficients and Kappa coefficient. Results of the experiment had showed a strong positive correlation with all the correlation coefficients at 0.7 or higher. Thus, the scoring results of the proposed scoring system are similar to those of human raters. Therefore, the automated scoring system should be found to be useful as a scoring tool.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.61-82
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• 2015

This study investigated the learning process of Chines international student within a technology environment, who was studying in Korea to be well equipped as a math teacher in future. Her activities were observed and guided in a class for pre-service teachers in one university, Kyunggido, in the second semester of 2014. She experienced obstacles such as the lacks of comprehending Korean sentences, Korean math terminologies, mathematical concepts, and fidelities of technology in her learning. She was recovered by bilingual effect, visualization activities, repetition activities, and group activities. There was a learning helper who made her learning possible in a bilingual way. Thus, the bilingual education is crucial for students with multi-cultural background.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.147-165
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• 2015

Through short-answer questions, we can reflect the depth of students' understanding and higher-order thinking skills. Scoring for short-answer questions may take long time and may be an issue on consistency of grading. To alleviate such the suffering, automated scoring systems are widely used in Europe and America, but are in the initial stage in research in Korea. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic scoring system for short Korean free-text responses using semi-supervised learning. First of all, based on the similarity score between students' answers and model answers, the proposed system grades students' answers and the scored answers with high reliability have been included in the model answers through the thorough test. This process repeats until all answers are scored. The proposed system is used experimentally in Korean and social studies in Nationwide Scholastic Achievement Test. We have confirmed that the processing time and the consistency of grades are promisingly improved. Using the system, various assessment methods have got to be developed and comparative studies need to be performed before applying to school fields.