• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.171-198
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• 2009

The current study explored a pedagogical possibility of utilizing magic as a source of communicative tasks for young learners in developing their English speaking proficiency. Fifteen primary school students participated in the study, which consisted of a 17-week period of task-based English instruction and data collection. The participants were instructed to accomplish various types of magic task through collaborative group interaction. The data collected for the study pertained to the students' linguistic outputs, interactions in group and attitudes to English learning. They were analyzed for how magic tasks affect the students' English proficiency developments and group interactions. The study results suggested the significant improvement in the students' English speaking proficiencies. They revealed that magic tasks contributed to a) enhancing the motivation to speak in English, b) stimulating the creative and problem-solving processes, and c) providing the sufficient opportunity to repeat and internalize the target expressions. The study results also indicated that the students' satisfaction with their group members and tasks seemed to have positive influences on their interactions in group and English proficiency development. Further discussion and pedagogical implications are provided as well as the study limitations.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.309-326
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• 2011

This study examines the relationship between second language use outside of class and oral proficiency development. It first identifies out-of-class activities of international graduate students in the U.S. and the average time spent speaking English in those out-of-class activities. Interviews and student self-measurements of time spent speaking English each day were used to investigate the types and quantities of out-of-class activities. In addition, two sets of student oral proficiency test scores were collected. Correlation analysis is used to find out the relationship of the variables between the most salient out-of-class activities and oral proficiency gains. The findings indicate that second language use outside of class is important for international graduate students to improve their oral proficiency. This is especially true with regularized interaction such as talking at work and the average time spent speaking in English a day outside of class. This study suggests that learners of English in an ESL environment should be encouraged to take part in out-of-class activities in addition to English use in the classroom in order for them to improve their oral proficiency.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations between phonetic differences among Korean learners' production of English front vowels, pronunciation intelligibility and speaking proficiency test score. To do so, thirty Korean university students were asked (1) to read English text book paragraphs and (2) describe a picture. Two English native raters and one Korean rater evaluated Korean subjects' English pronunciation intelligibility and speaking. In addition, subjects' English vowel productions were acoustically analyzed(F0, F1, F2, vowel duration, intensity). The results of the study show that the vowel quality and pitch of the unstressed vowels and lax vowel are related to the pronunciation intelligibility. In addition, the scores of pronunciation intelligibility and speaking are highly related.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.193-211
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• 2003

This study aims to illustrate students' and teachers' perceptions towards certification of English proficiency and proficiency- based curriculum, and to investigate their needs for developing college English program. A total of 597 students and 28 teachers participated in the survey. The findings showed that both groups acknowledged the usefulness of the certification of English proficiency and proficiency-based curriculum. However, both groups showed a negative response to 'waive test' (testing for the replacement of English required class). They also expressed high level of needs in increasing the number of courses and credit hours, reducing the class size, and improving facilities. Both groups perceived speaking and listening as more important skills, while students showed various preferences for effective language practice activities. The findings of this study suggest t hat the introduction of certification of English proficiency should he supplemented with follow-ups both in pedagogical aspect and on administrative level.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.127-142
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• 2004

This paper examines the relationship between children's English proficiency in grade three and English learning environment and experiences before entering elementary school. In English learning environment and experiences, three influences consisting of children, home environment, and environmental influences of English learning are used to find out which influences contributed to children's English proficiency in grade three of elementary school. The result of this study shows that children with high interest in English have higher proficiency in all language skills reading, writing, listening, and speaking than that of children with low interests. For parents' influences, parents' high interests toward their children's English leaning and high monthly income result in children's high English proficiency. For English environmental influences, children who start at the early age and continue studying English have higher English proficiency.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.1-22
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• 2012

This study explores the effects of phonological awareness instruction with phonetics on listening comprehension and speaking. For the test of measuring the improvement of listening comprehension, two nationwide listening comprehension tests were used for pre-test and post-test. To find out the improvement of speaking ability, students were required to take the Level-3 NEAT speaking tests. There was a notable correlation between phonological awareness instruction with phonetics and listening ability. Also a significant correlation between phonological awareness instruction with phonetics and speaking ability was found. The group with phonological awareness class with phonetics received higher scores in listening and speaking test than the group without phonological awareness class with phonetics in the post-test. This study implies that phonological awareness class with phonetics is helpful for the improvement of listening and speaking ability. With this research, we can also say that students' communicative competence increased.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.47-54
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• 2023

This study attempted to test the hypothesis that Korean evaluators can score L2 speech appropriately, even when speech rate features are unavailable. Two perception experiments-preliminary and main-were conducted sequentially. The purpose of the preliminary experiment was to categorize English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) speakers into two groups-advanced learners and lower-level learners-based on the proficiency scores given by five human raters. In the main experiment, a set of stimuli was prepared such that the speech rate of all data tokens was modified to have a uniform speech rate. Ten human evaluators were asked to score the stimulus tokens on a 5-point scale. These scores were statistically analyzed to determine whether there was a significant difference in utterance production between the two groups. The results of the preliminary experiment confirm that higher-proficiency learners speak faster than lower-proficiency learners. The results of the main experiment indicate that under controlled speech-rate conditions, human raters can appropriately assess learner proficiency, probably thanks to the linguistic features that the raters considered during the evaluation process.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.329-339
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• 2011

This study aims at investigating how English proficiency affects economic development of a country by analyzing the relationships among English proficiency, economic activities (amount of trade, R&D investment, etc), and the rate of economic growth, focusing on twenty-one non-English-speaking OECD countries. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Seemingly Unrelated Regression Estimation (SURE) were used for the data analysis in the study. The findings reveals that there existed little statistical significance to support the fact that English proficiency was directly related to the economic development in a positive way in many countries except Mexico, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Poland. However, English proficiency indirectly influenced the economic development in the way of increasing the amount of trade. These results can lead to the conclusion that English proficiency is not a sufficient element but a necessary one. Furthermore, it is expected that English proficiency can positively affect the economic development when it plays a part as sufficient complementary goods which make up for physical capital, technology accumulation, political stability, and worthy government.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.3172-3179
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• 2015

This study suggests one of English teaching methods to improve English speaking proficiency for adult English learners. Contrary to the traditional English conversation teaching trends such as memorization of specific patterns or grammar-focused practices, the study introduces a storytelling based teaching of English speaking. To theoretically support the storytelling based English speaking teaching, the study investigates the possibility of the teaching method in three ways. First, the 12 speaking strategies focusing on contents of a story are introduced in the way of securing speech amounts as much as possible. Next, the five rhetoric components by Aristotle are introduced to relate to the storytelling teaching for the purpose of achieving the goal of speaking, which is to deliver what a speaker want to say more persuasively. Finally, through the investigation of the learner strategy uses, the possibility of storytelling English speaking teaching can be expected regardless of learners' low level of English proficiency.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.229-252
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• 2004

The TOEIC has widely used to evaluate business English proficiency in Korea, but those who achieved high scores still often face difficulties in performing their duties in English at work. This implies that the test may not evaluate business English proficiency effectively enough. With an ultimate goal of proposing an effective way of assessing business English proficiency, therefore, his study analyzed the predictive validity of the TOEIC. A correlation analysis was conducted between TOEIC scores of 64 office workers of multinational companies and their working skills in English evaluated by themselves, and their colleagues and seniors. Its results illustrated a significant correlation between their listening and reading scores and their working skills measured by all the groups, but not between their scores and their working skills in speaking and writing. In addition, the study did a delphi study to identify working skills in English to be assessed in business English tests and a contents analysis of the TOEIC. The results suggest business English tests should be able to assess working skills by work types and more direct testing of working skills in speaking and writing is needed.