• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.5
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• pp.149-189
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• 1999

Assessment can be defined as any method used to understand the current knowledge that a student possesses. Assessment may influence decisions about grades, placement, instructional needs, and curriculum. Therefore, the purpose of assessment is to identify how the students think and know, to diagnose the difficulties they face, and to reflect the result of assessment on teaching. But the traditional multiple-choice test failed to evaluate and teach higher-level thinking and problem-solving skills. In this context, performance assessment is being required as an alternative assessment to get better understanding about what the students can do as well as what they know. This article points out some weaknesses of traditional assessments, and comments on the theoretical background and necessity of performance assessment. And it presents more specific information about performance assessment and some examples. It is certain that performance assessment is student-centered and future-oriented. But performance assessment can't be the surest and best way of evaluating the students' abilities. We are just on the way of another experimental stage for improving teaching methodology. More supplementary analyses and further improvements are needed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.3
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• pp.1-12
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• 1997

Errors in EFL writing are very often attributable to learner's inadequate understanding of the target culture. Most of these errors are very hard to identify because they are grammatically correct notwithstanding the meaning. EFL learners almost habitually equate the meaning and usage of a linguistic item when it is present both in the native and the target languages. However, seemingly identical items in both languages sometimes prove themselves to be distinct from each other because of cultural differences. Some expressions in the native language are neither socially acceptable nor meaningful in the target language. Out of sheer ignorance, moreover, one puts a target item in the way he may use it in his native language. For instance. the primary feature of the term "friend" in Korean is [+same age group]. So, a Korean young man is not supposed to call his teacher a friend. This paper aims to clarify patterns of college level writing errors caused by interference of mother culture.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.207-227
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• 2011

This paper investigates how two different modes of feedback (selective vs. comprehensive) affect selected students' writing development in terms of three different types of measurement (accuracy, fluency, and complexity). 139 university students participated in the study, and 278 writing samples were analyzed. The results of the study indicate that participants who received selective feedback wrote more accurately and fluently than their counterparts. However, in terms of complexity, both selective and comprehensive groups showed no sign of improvement in semester-based investigations. The results of this study support Skehan's (2009) theory of trade-off effects, suggesting that 'natural' tension exists between accuracy and complexity when resources are limited. Moreover, this finding contrasts with the theory of Cognition Hypothesis, which proposes that task complexity will be associated with increases in complexity and accuracy. In the study, selected participants (N=21) strongly nominated their error sources as unfamiliarity toward using key words, usage, transition, and sentence types. This study not only contributes to the accumulation of our current knowledge in the related area of theory, but offers educational implications for those who are dealing with intermediate-level students when deciding what particular teaching content should constitute a priority within a limited instructional period.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.125-147
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• 2012

The primary goal of the study was to provide some preliminary validity evidence for the Vocabulary Grade Levels Test (Busan Metropolitan City Office of Education, 2009), which is designed to measure the receptive vocabulary knowledge of learners in L2. For the purpose of the current study, 327 participants at the elementary school participated in the study and were asked to take two different vocabulary tests. Namely, a Vocabulary Size Test (Nation, 2001) and a Vocabulary Grade Levels Test. The data were analyzed using correlation in order to discover the relationship between these two types of tests. Following this, the Rasch analysis was conducted to examine the reliability and validity of the measurement in question. The data analysis showed that both grade separation reliability and item separation reliability were high, indicating that the Vocabulary Grade Levels Test well discriminates learners with a wide range of proficiency levels. The findings of the study are discussed, along with further improvements in order to ascertain the validity of this particular vocabulary test.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.21-40
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• 2004

This study Questioned what happens in L2 reading comprehension of the expository text, as measured by recall and inference-making abilities, when a L2 reader was induced to develop a content schema about the topic of a target text, but the structure of that schema departs from the structure of the target text Seventy-four. Korean university students read either the same version text twice (consistent condition) or two different version texts (inconsistent condition) with a three-day interval between the two readings. The results of a verification test indicate that, for those subjects with higher L2 reading proficiency, the inconsistent condition was more beneficial than the consistent condition for the inference-making task. On the other hand, for lower-level L2 readers, the consistent condition was more favorable for the recall task. It was concluded that inducing a structurally inconsistent schema through an L2 pre-reading would be beneficial only when the reader's L2 linguistic ability is proficient enough to produce necessary propositions from the pre-reading.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.127-152
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• 2006

For the past 20 years the process approach to writing has been popular in second language writing classrooms. However, there have been very few studies conducted in Korea with regard to the composing processes and the effects of proficiency on writers' usage. The present study attempts to begin to fill this gap. Three groups of college students with different writing proficiency participated in the study: the advanced group, the intermediate group, and the beginning group. The verbal protocol of their writing processes revealed that they approached writing tasks differently. While the advanced writers focused on generating texts and ideas and examined their writing at both global and local levels, the other two groups of students tended to focus on evaluating text at the local level and generated fewer ideas and less text. The findings from this study are then compared to those of some major studies of the composing process as conclusions are subsequently drawn about the specific needs of Korean college writers.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.59-85
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• 2007

This study examined patterns of engaging in "reading in connection to writing" (hereafter reading-writing practices) in the context of two ESL college composition classrooms. The purpose of this study was to explore whether the L2 proficiency level could be a key construct in explaining similarities and differences in reading-writing practices which students engaged in during the composing process. Multiple sources of data collected over the semester included interview protocols, written products, and observational notes. The results showed that the three proficiency groups under examination differed widely in the ways reading was connected to writing and in the types of intermediate texts produced during the composing process. The students in the high proficiency group produced more intermediate texts through an engagement in reading-writing practices connected to each other. On the contrary, the students in lower proficiency groups engaged in a limited range of reading-writing practices without support of intermediate texts. This study provides insight into the different ways ESL college students coordinate reading and writing while composing essays.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.220-234
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• 2000

This paper focuses on how and where to set learner goals in English phonetic education in Japan, especially at the threshold level, and on what components are necessary to achieve them both from practical and theoretical perspectives. It first describes some issues mainly through the speaker's own teaching plan and a literature review of various researchers such as Morley (1991), Kajima (1989), Porcaro (1999), Matsul (1996), Lambacher (1995, 1996), Dalton and Seidlhofer (1994), and Murphy (1991). By comparing and analyzing these and other researchers, the speaker tries to set and elucidate reasonable and achievable goals for students to attain intelligibility for comprehensible communicative output. The paper then suggests detailed components that form an essential part of desirable pronunciation teaching plan in order to realize a well-balanced curriculum between segmental and suprasegmental aspects.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.29-37
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• 2009

This paper presents results from speech production experiments on English, Korean, and Hindi that compare variation in the acoustic expression of dissimilar phonological laryngeal contrast in stops conditioned by prosodic prominence. Target stops are analyzed from utterance-initial, -medial, and -final positions, with a variation in contrastive focal accent, from the speech data by six male American English speakers, five male Seoul Korean speakers, and five male Delhi Hindi speakers. The results show that prosodic prominence conditions enhanced distinctiveness between contrastive segments in the three languages. The manner in which prosodic prominence and prosodic phrase structure is marked at the level of segmental variation is, however, found to be language-specific to some extent. In addition, a correlation between the size of the phonological inventory and the corresponding acoustic variation was found but the linear correlation was not strongly supported with the findings in the present study.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.1-7
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• 2018

Reference string recognition is to extract individual reference strings from a reference section of an academic article, which consists of a sequence of reference lines. This task has been attacked by heuristic-based, clustering-based, classification-based approaches, exploiting lexical and layout characteristics of reference lines. Most classification-based methods have used sequence labeling to assign labels to either a sequence of tokens within reference lines, or a sequence of reference lines. Unlike the previous token-level sequence labeling approach, this study attempts to assign different labels to the beginning, intermediate and terminating tokens of a reference string. After that, post-processing is applied to identify reference strings by predicting their beginning and/or terminating tokens. Experimental evaluation using English and German reference string recognition datasets shows that the proposed method obtains above 94% in the macro-averaged F1.