• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.1019-1029
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• 2014

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the creation and pedagogical use of English learner corpora. Many studies have shown that learner corpora can not only make a significant contribution to second language acquisition research but also contribute to the construction and evaluation of language tests by advancing our understanding of English learners. So far, however, little attention has been paid to the Korean EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' corpus. The Yonsei English Learner Corpus (YELC 2011) is a specialized, monolingual, and synchronic Korean EFL learner corpus that was developed by Yonsei University from 2011 to 2012. Over 3,000 Korean high school graduates (or equivalents) who were accepted by Yonsei University for their further studies participated in this project. It consists of 6,572 written texts (1,085,828 words) at nine different English proficiency levels. In this paper, we describe its compilation, and more specifically, how we have corpusized from a text archive to a corpus. After introducing the process of corpusization, we report arresting insights into the specific linguistic features that different proficiency levels of Korean learners of English have. This study also discusses the potential use of the YELC 2011 which is now freely available for research purposes.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.25-42
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• 2023

The number of studies on data-driven learning (DDL) has increased in recent years, and DDL's overall effectiveness as an L2 (second language) teaching methodology has been reported to be high. However, the degree of its effectiveness in grammar instruction, particularly for the goal of correcting errors in L2 writing, is still unclear. To provide guidelines for focused grammar instruction with DDL in the Japanese classroom setting, we aimed to identify the typical grammatical errors made by Japanese learners in the Cambridge Learner Corpus First Certificate in English (CLC FCE) dataset. The results revealed that three error types (nouns, articles, and prepositions) should be addressed in DDL grammar instruction for Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. In light of the findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions for future DDL research and practice are discussed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.139-157
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• 2006

As the Communicative Approach has become the norm in foreign language teaching, the objectives of teaching English in school have changed radically in Korea. The focus in high school English textbooks has shifted from mere mastery of structures to communicative proficiency. This paper will study five polysemous words which appear in twelve high school English textbooks used in Korea. The twelve text books are incorporated into a single corpus and analyzed to classify the usage of the selected words. Then the usage of each word was compared with that of three other corpora based sources: the BNC(British National Corpus) Sampler, ICE Singapore(International Corpus of English for Singapore) and Collins COBUILD learner's dictionary which is based on the corpus, "The Bank of English". The comparisons carried out as part of this study will demonstrate that Korean text books do not always supply the full range of meanings of polysemous words.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.83-102
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to find out some major characteristics of intermediate-advanced Korean learners' English by corpus- linguistically analyzing their essays in comparison with native speakers'. We construct a corpus of CBT TOEFL essays by Korean learners, NNS1 (94076 words in 402 texts), and its sub-corpus, NNS2 (14291 words in 45 texts), and then a corpus of model essays written or meticulously edited by native speakers, NS (14833 words in 35 texts). We compare NNS1 and NNS2 with NS, and with some other corpora, in terms of high-frequency words, and show that Korean learners' writings have more features of informal writing than those of formal writing, which is in accord with the reports in Granger (1998) that EFL writings by European advanced learners are characterized by informality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1057-1085
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• 2009

This paper addresses the question of why prepositions are particularly difficult forEFL learners. The first reason for such difficulty lies in the distinction between seemingly equivalent prepositions such as to and with, as in compared to and compared with. Most monolingual learners' dictionaries regard these two phrases as virtually synonymous. Yet, the results of the corpus analysis conducted in this study indicate that there are differences between the two. A second reason why EFL learners have problems with prepositions is that there are often variations in the inputdata. For example, although from generally follows different, in American English different than is also used. On the other hand, in British English, different to is the second most commonly used construction. This type of regional variation, confirmed in the corpus findings of the present paper, causes confusion in students of English. A learner who is not accustomed to British English may be puzzled by the expression different to. Finally, L1 negative transfer is responsible for the incorrect use of expressions such as discuss about. An error of this sort is the result of interference from the learner's mother tongue. The English verb discuss is not subcategorized for a preposition, whereas the equivalent Korean verb, for example, requires a noun phrase combined with the postposition.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.151-170
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• 2009

Recently speech texts have been increasingly used for English education because of their various advantages as language teaching and learning materials. The purpose of this paper is to analyze speech texts in a corpus-based lexical approach, and suggest some productive methods which utilize English speaking or writing as the main resource for the course, along with introducing the actual classroom adaptations. First, this study shows that a speech corpus has some unique features such as different selections of pronouns, nouns, and lexical chunks in comparison to a general corpus. Next, from a collocational perspective, the study demonstrates that the speech corpus consists of a wide variety of collocations and lexical chunks which a number of linguists describe (Lewis, 1997; McCarthy, 1990; Willis, 1990). In other words, the speech corpus suggests that speech texts not only have considerable lexical potential that could be exploited to facilitate chunk-learning, but also that learners are not very likely to unlock this potential autonomously. Based on this result, teachers can develop a learners' corpus and use it by chunking the speech text. This new approach of adapting speech samples as important materials for college students' speaking or writing ability should be implemented as shown in samplers. Finally, to foster learner's productive skills more communicatively, a few practical suggestions are made such as chunking and windowing chunks of speech and presentation, and the pedagogical implications are discussed.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.48-52
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to examine 30 logical connectors in the essay writing of Korean university students for comparison with the use in similar types of native English writing. The main questions addressed were as follows: Do Korean EFL students tend to over- or underuse logical connectors? What types of connectors differentiate Korean learners from native use? To answer these questions, EFL learner data were compared with data from native speakers using computerized corpora and linguistic software tools to speed up the initial stage of the linguistic analysis. The analysis revealed that Korean EFL learners tend to overuse logical connectors in the initial position of the sentence, and that they tend to overuse additive connectors such as 'moreover', 'besides', and 'furthermore', whereas they underuse contrastive connectors such as 'yet' and 'instead'. On the basis of the results of this study, some pedagogical implications are made concerning the need for teaching of the semantic, stylistic, and syntactic behavior of logical connectors.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.281-284
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• 2017

On the basis of studies that show multi-word combinations, that is the field of phraseology, this study aims to examine relationship between the quality of text and phraseological competence in L2 English writing, following Yves Bestegen et al. (2014). Using two different association scores, t-score and Mutual Information(MI), which are opposite ways of measuring phraseological competence, in terms of scoring frequency and infrequency, bigrams from L2 writers' text scored based on a reference corpus, GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web based English). On a cross-sectional approach, we propose that the quality of the essays and the mean MI score of the bigram extracted from YELC, Yonsei English Learner Corpus, correlated to each other. The negative scores of bigrams are also correlated with the quality of the essays in the way that these bigrams are absent from the reference corpus, that is mostly ungrammatical. It indicates that increase in the proportion of the negative scored bigrams debases the quality of essays. The conclusion shows the quality of the essays scored by MI and t-score on cross-sectional approach, and application to teaching method and assessment for second language writing proficiency.

• 한국어정보학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.281-284
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• 2017

On the basis of studies that show multi-word combinations, that is the field of phraseology, this study aims to examine relationship between the quality of text and phraseological competence in L2 English writing, following Yves Bestegen et al. (2014). Using two different association scores, t-score and Mutual Information(MI), which are opposite ways of measuring phraseological competence, in terms of scoring frequency and infrequency, bigrams from L2 writers' text scored based on a reference corpus, GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web based English). On a cross-sectional approach, we propose that the quality of the essays and the mean MI score of the bigram extracted from YELC, Yonsei English Learner Corpus, correlated to each other. The negative scores of bigrams are also correlated with the quality of the essays in the way that these bigrams are absent from the reference corpus, that is mostly ungrammatical. It indicates that increase in the proportion of the negative scored bigrams debases the quality of essays. The conclusion shows the quality of the essays scored by MI and t-score on cross-sectional approach, and application to teaching method and assessment for second language writing proficiency.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.35-49
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• 2022

This study examines crosslinguistic influence on the use of concessive conditionals by Japanese EFL learners. Contrastive analysis suggests that Japanese native speakers may overuse the concessive conditional even if due to partial similarities to Japanese concessive conditionals, whose formal and semantic restrictions are fewer than those of English concessive conditionals. This hypothesis is tested using data from the written module of the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). Comparison of Japanese native speakers with English native speakers and Chinese native speakers reveals the following trends. First, Japanese native speakers tend to overuse concessive conditionals compared to native speakers, while similar overuse is not observed in Chinese native speaker data. Second, non-nativelike uses of even if appear in contexts allowing the use of concessive conditionals in Japanese. Third, while overuse and infelicitous use of even if is observed at all proficiency levels, formal errors are restricted to learners at lower proficiency levels. These findings suggest that crosslinguistic influence does occur in the use of concessive conditionals, and that its particular realization is affected by L2 proficiency, with formal crosslinguistic influence mediated at an earlier stage than semantic cross-linguistic influence.