• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.427-437
• /
• 2018

This study explored the effectiveness of the online English learning program contents for elementary school students. The study used the online English learning program served by Gyeonggi province office of education. 107 students attending P elementary school in K city volunteered for the program. After studying English via the website for almost one year, they were asked to respond the questionnaires related to the contents of the online English program. Since the research investigated that the relations of students' grades, the time for the study, their diagnostic test scores, and the effectiveness of the contents, the survey responses were analyzed with Spearman correlation. As a result, older students thought that the type of problem-solving, the type of performing a task, WBI (Web Based Instruction) were not efficacious. Also, these types of online English program were chosen as ineffective from the students at the higher level. Whereas the type of private lesson, the lessons based on a story, and the type of animation were preferred to the students who spent longer time on the website. This highlights the need to consider the students' characteristics such as students' grades, the time for the study, and their English level when developing the contents of the online English learning program.

• Journal of the Korean Society of School Health
• /
• v.26 no.2
• /
• pp.62-71
• /
• 2013

Purpose: This study was conducted to examine the level of communication, problem-solving, and self-directed learning competencies, academic and English achievement of healthcare major students in university and to determine the effect of three main competencies on their academic and English achievement. Methods: The participants were college students studying in health care related major at a four-year university in D-city who agreed to participate in this study. Some of their data were intentionally excluded as their answers were incomplete or missing and finally 272 surveys were analyzed. Results: It was found that they have high level of general life competencies of which the subcategories are communication, problem-solving, and self-directed learning competency. GPA and TOEIC score which are the indicators of academic and English achievement were found to be correlated with the level of three competencies. Self-directed learning competency is assumed to be main cause variable of these achievement. Conclusion: As those students who have higher academic and English achievement also show high level of communication, problem-solving and self-directed learning competency. It is argued that a new curriculum that can contribute to improve communication, problem-solving and self-directed learning competency should be developed and implemented.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.13 no.3
• /
• pp.253-273
• /
• 2007

This study explores issues on how students' variables are related to their educational achievement in English subject. The National Assessment of Educational Achievement (NAEA) is conduced every year to measure educational progress and achievement, and to monitor the quality of education at the national level and appropriateness of the national curriculum. It also serves the purpose to collect background information affecting educational achievement. The background information is gathered by using questionnaires for students, teachers and school administrators. Among the student variables in the national level educational achievement assessment is self-regulated learning, which is composed of self-efficacy, self-control and learning strategy. In the NAEA in 2005 it was found that the features of self-regulated learning were significantly correlated to test scores in English. The findings from the analysis of the trends of the relationships between test scores in English and information on students' self-regulated learning provide implications for the national curriculum as well as for learning and teaching.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.43-65
• /
• 2004

In the comprehension of English texts, Korean students generally try to translate English into Korean in accordance with the word order of Korean language. As a result, the comprehension of English texts is made in a regressive way, which results in slower reading. In order to enhance the reading speed, it is necessary for students to practice progressive reading. Also, while reading English texts, most readers' eyes tend to look at one word at a time, which actually cuts down on the reading speed. Reading by the sense group of as many words as possible at a glance, however, can help a reader more efficiently in less time. This research aims at developing the Powerpoint program for progressive reading by the sense group according to the student's level. In this program, as for methodology, the technique of rooking it fade-away is introduced to force a reader's eyes to move fast. Through this technique, it is possible to make a line of the texts disappear on the screen and make another line appear, which enables a reader to sweep the words across each and every line of the reading material smoothly without regression.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.185-210
• /
• 2006

This study has two purposes. First, it aims to suggest an appropriate approach to English writing education for Korean high school students in a cooperative learning situation. It also aims to suggest what type of learner grouping, either homogeneous or heterogeneous, is appropriate by comparing the learners' writing abilities and the changes of their affective factors after being exposed to cooperative EFL writing instruction. Two homogeneous classes were selected and instructed to write in English for 11 weeks. One was composed of homogeneous small groups based on the students' writing scores, and the other was composed of heterogeneous small groups, again based on the students' writing scores. The results showed that the improvement between the two class types was quite different across different proficiency levels. For example, although there is little difference between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous classes of low and intermediate-level learners in writing ability improvement, high-level students showed a significant difference between the classes. In addition, it was found that class participation correlated significantly to writing ability improvement. Cooperative learning was proved to be an effective writing instructional approach to encourage learners' interest and increase their self-confidence; however, the results did not show any significant differences in learners' affective domain between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous classes. Similarly, the learners' grouping preference was not affected by the grouping method.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.12 no.2
• /
• pp.215-235
• /
• 2006

This paper explores the effects of two different methods of instruction for 106 low-level Korean learners of English at a college in learning request expressions. Both of the methods contained the focus-on-form and function characteristics, while the degree of explicitness for input enhancement was differentiated. Abundant email samples written by English native speakers for the input were provided and email writing practice for the output was proceeded for both groups of the students in the treatment sessions. The numbers of target forms used in pretest and posttest results were compared quantitatively: The tests included email writing and open-ended Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The results indicated that the target pragmatic features were slightly better learned under the condition of relatively high degree of explicit instruction with metapragmatic information, even though the difference was statistically insignificant. In addition, the students' use of request strategies both in email and DCT was affected positively by the treatment with email input and output. That is, the students applied the request strategies they learned through email into their oral production (open-ended DCT) as well as their email writing. Further study on the output effect of target features in advancing pragmatic competence is suggested.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.4
• /
• pp.165-173
• /
• 2002

Strong compression effects in a stressed vowel due to the addition of syllables have been adopted as evidence for stress-timing. In relation to this, Yun (2002) investigated the compression effects of number of syllables on Korean vowel. The results generally revealed that Korean had neither significant nor consistent anticipatory or backwards compression effects, especially when it came to the sentence level. This led us to claim that Korean would not be a stress-timed language. But the language investigated in the study was only Korean, and further cross-linguistic research was needed to confirm the claim. In this study, Yun's (2002) sentence level data are compared with Fowler's (1981) English data. The comparison reveals that Korean seems to be similar to English in the backwards compression effect, whereas the two languages are markedly different in the anticipatory compression effect. Thus, if English is a stress-timed language and the strong anticipatory compression effect is evidence in favour of stress-timing as is claimed, the present cross-linguistic study confirms Yun's (2002) suggestion-Korean is unlikely to be stress-timed. On the other hand, compression effects are revisited: the differences in vowel compression between English and Korean are discussed from the syntactic and phonological points of view.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2003.05a
• /
• pp.168-171
• /
• 2003

This study is about modeling pronunciation dictionary necessary for PLU(phoneme like unit) level word recognition. The recognition of nonnative speakers' pronunciation enables an automatic diagnosis and an error detection which are the core of English pronunciation tutoring system. The above system needs two pronunciation dictionaries. One is for representing standard English pronunciation. The other is for representing Korean speakers' English Pronunciation. Both dictionaries are integrated to generate pronunciation networks for variants.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.1-23
• /
• 2005

This paper is a qualitative and quantitative study. The main purpose of the paper is to diagnose what makes English communication difficult at the Korean EFL adult level. In order to obtain data, this study employed interviews and a questionnaire. We identified thirty three factors blocking pathways to oral communication. Qualitative analysis repeatedly revealed patterns such as lack of grammar, lack of vocabulary, lack of background knowledge, and peer pressure, but quantitative analysis yielded somewhat different results: lack of colloquial expressions, lack of vocabulary, lack of various topics, problems in the educational system, difficulty in using existing knowledge, and lack of grammar. Findings which were common to both qualitative and quantitative analyses suggest that lack of linguistic knowledge and lack of background knowledge are major barriers learners encounter in communication. On the basis of the results, suggestions are made for overcoming these barriers.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.67-84
• /
• 2012

The present study investigated the effect of sentence translation as a production task on short-term and long-term retention of foreign vocabulary. 87 EFL university students at a beginning level, enrolled in reading class participated in the study. The study compared the performance of three groups on vocabulary recall: (1) Control group, (2) Translation group, and (3) Copy group. During the treatment sessions, translation group translated L1 sentences into English, while copy group simply copied given English sentences with each target word. Results of the immediate test were collected each week from week 2 to week 5 and analyzed by one-way ANOVA. Results revealed that regarding short-term vocabulary retention, participants in rote-copy condition outperformed those in translation group. Four weeks later a delayed test was administered to measure long-term vocabulary retention. In contrast, the results of two-way repeated measures ANOVA showed that long-term vocabulary retention of translation group was significantly greater than copy group. The findings suggest that although sentence translation is rather challenging to low-level learners, it may facilitate long-term retention of new vocabulary given the more elaborate and deeper processing the task entails.