• 영어어문교육
• /
• 제15권3호
• /
• pp.129-150
• /
• 2009

This paper attempts to examine the effect of children's English stories on the development of Korean EFL primary school learners' listening and speaking competences and their motivation to learn English. This paper also discusses factors of English children's stories that make EFL learners' language learning efficient. Participants were 120 primary school students who attend one of the elementary schools in Chungnam province. They were randomly chosen and divided into two groups: experimental and control groups. In order to collect data, students' listening and speaking proficiency pre- and post-tests and the pre- and post-questionnaires regarding the participants' motivation to learn English were administered. The data were analyzed by ANOVA. The results indicate that the application of English children's stories to EFL learning settings can be an efficient way to improve EFL learners' listening and speaking competences and motivation to learn their target language. The findings of this study suggest that English children's stories provide language learners with interest, meaningful and authentic contexts and enjoyment. The pedagogical suggestion and implications are provided for EFL educators and teachers.

• 한국어교육
• /
• 제29권2호
• /
• pp.49-72
• /
• 2018

The purpose of this study is to introduce an efficient measure in Korean language education for learners of Korean by applying shadowing techniques which focus on improving not only listening and speaking skills but also reading and writing skills. First of all, the study discusses about the definition of shadowing along with the effect of shadowing. The second part will be about examining the proposed method related to shadowing technique which is comprised of original shadowing techniques and other techniques transformed from the original. Thirdly, the paper will be discussing background information of the shadowing technique in previous researches and experiments using shadowing techniques in Korean language education. Finally, there will be an introduction of learning measures that apply to skill unification. Most of the previous researches of the shadowing technique were limited to a few students with only mid-to-high level learners while this method could cover up to a wide range of learners. The most effective way of learning a foreign language would firstly be the suggested method and the focus should be on repetition and practice of the learners.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• 제18권2호
• /
• pp.282-291
• /
• 2022

This research applies a pre-trained bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) handwriting recognition model to predict foreign Korean-language learners' writing scores. A corpus of 586 answers to midterm and final exams written by foreign learners at the Intermediate 1 level was acquired and used for pre-training, resulting in consistent performance, even with small datasets. The test data were pre-processed and fine-tuned, and the results were calculated in the form of a score prediction. The difference between the prediction and actual score was then calculated. An accuracy of 95.8% was demonstrated, indicating that the prediction results were strong overall; hence, the tool is suitable for the automatic scoring of Korean written test answers, including grammatical errors, written by foreigners. These results are particularly meaningful in that the data included written language text produced by foreign learners, not native speakers.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제14권2호
• /
• pp.19-28
• /
• 2022

The current study was designed to explore whether taking English pronunciation classes could improve the realization of English rhythm by Korean learners of English. Specifically, this study used various rhythm metrics to examine the extent to which the learners' speech became rhythmically similar to the target language after taking classes that focused on English pronunciation. Sixteen learners who took a 15-week English pronunciation course at a university read an English passage twice (at the beginning and the end of the semester). The rhythm metrics such as Deltas, Varcos, and Pairwise Variability Indices were calculated for the learners' speech, as well as that of 8 native speakers of English. The results demonstrated that the learners' speech was slower, and they put more frequent within-sentence pauses than the native speakers even after the classes. The analyses also indicated that the speech recorded at the beginning of the semester was rhythmically much more different from the target language than at the end of the semester. After the classes, however, the learners' consonantal intervals became much more target-like, while the vocalic intervals were rhythmically even further from those in the target language. Overall, the findings suggested that the pronunciation classes helped the learners to produce English speech that was rhythmically similar to the native speakers.

• 한국어교육
• /
• 제29권1호
• /
• pp.1-23
• /
• 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.

• 한국항해항만학회지
• /
• 제38권2호
• /
• pp.127-134
• /
• 2014

This paper aims to identify what is needed to improve the English for Specific Purposes(ESP) curriculum for English as a Foreign Language(EFL) college learners at navigation school. Different needs from learners and experienced professionals are identified through diversified methods, and the findings from these are analysed and consolidated from a balanced point of view. For this purpose, putting learners at the centre of analysis, identifying their subjective and objective needs serves as a point of departure in formulating the curriculum. Then, the target situation is analysed according to the short-term aim of getting a job, followed by long-term needs for successfully fulfilling future duties as a pilot. Based on findings, it is suggested that ESP curriculum for learners in navigation studies should be focused on the successful language performance of their actual duties and tasks to be given in the future working situations, rather than on immediate needs for getting a job. In particular, special attention needs to be paid to enhancing learners' productive language competences through a series of hands-on trainings and a wide range of extra-curricular activities, specifically for a higher command of oral communication. For this, not only ESP, curriculum for EGP(English for General Purposes) should be systematically structured as ESP-oriented EGP, and naturally move onto areas of ESP in a coherent manner.

• 아시아태평양코퍼스연구
• /
• 제4권2호
• /
• pp.1-39
• /
• 2023

Recent research in usage-based Second Language Acquisition has provided new insights into second language (L2) learners' development of formulaic language (Wulff, 2019). The current study examines the use of phrase-frames, which are recurring sequences of words including one or more variable slots (e.g., it is * that), in written and oral production data from Asian learners of English across four proficiency levels (beginner, low-intermediate, high-intermediate, advanced) and native English speakers. The variability, predictability, and discourse functions of the most frequent 4-word phrase-frames from the written essay and spoken dialogue sub-corpora of the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) were analyzed and then compared across groups and modes. The results revealed that while learners' phrase-frames in writing became more variable and unpredictable as proficiency increased, no clear developmental patterns were found in speaking, although all groups used more fixed and predictable phrase-frames than the reference group. Further, no developmental trajectories in the functions of the most frequent phrase-frames were found in both modes. Additionally, lower-level learners and the reference group used more variable phrase-frames in speaking, whereas advanced-level learners showed more variability in writing. This study contributes to a better understanding of the development of L2 phraseological competence.

• 한국영어학회지:영어학
• /
• 제4권1호
• /
• pp.33-60
• /
• 2004

This study was an attempt to present an appropriate way of interpreting L2 learners' linguistic behavior within Universal Grammar (UG) framework. Based on the Korean EFL adult learners' performance on the Subjacency violation sentences, the study suggested that the EFL learners are able to acquire subtle knowledge of target grammar and their linguistic behavior should be interpreted with the most recent version of UG theory, the Minimalist Program (MP) notion. The MP notion seems more plausible to accommodate incomplete L2 grammar while acknowledging UG-constrained interlanguage which the previous version, Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach, could not explain very well. The study observed no age-effects among the Korean EFL learners in their linguistic competence measured by the performance on the UG-constraint violation sentences. Having suggested that the MP notion can be a more reasonable tool to explain the EFL learners' linguistic behavior, the study introduced comprehensive hypotheses such as Constructionist Model (CM) and the Ontogeny Phylogeny Model (OPM).

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제2권1호
• /
• pp.23-32
• /
• 2010

This study aimed at discovering whether Korean language learners who had never been exposed to Korean phones before could distinguish Korean phones and whether learners who had comparatively better ability of identifying phonetic differences displayed a better result in acquiring Korean phonemes. The study conducted two experiments on 25 learners. In Experiment I, an oddball test (ABX) was performed to investigate the learners' ability to discriminate Korean phones on the first day of the course. In Experiment II, an identification test was administered to analyze the ability of identifying Korean phones on the same learners after three weeks of language instruction. The results revealed that the true-beginner learners demonstrated different phonetic discrimination abilities, but these abilities did not seem to correlate with the rate of acquisition.

• 한국영어학회지:영어학
• /
• 제2권3호
• /
• pp.305-327
• /
• 2002

This paper is in line with the attempts to examine two assumptions implied about the role of Universal Grammar (UC) in nonnative language acquisition: Are the EFL learners at disadvantage in acquiring UC-driven knowledge? Are there critical period effects in EFL learning? Based on the research with the seven studies of ESL and EFL adult learners performance on the Subjacency violation sentences, the paper investigates the extent to which the EFL adult learners can attain UG-driven knowledge represented by the Subjacency Principle. It also makes comparison of the EFL learners level of access to UG with that of their counterparts, the ESL learners. The research findings suggests that the EFL environment doesn't prevent the learners from acquiring target grammar in UG domain. That is, the current paper strongly suggests that the EFL adult-learners be able to acquire UG-driven knowledge to a considerable extent, at least as high as the ESL adult learners can attain. For the interpretation of the research results of the seven studies, Constructionist Hypothesis (CH) supported by a Minimalist Program (MP) assumption is employed. CH seems more plausible to account not only for incomplete acquisition observed among the beginning and intermediate level learners but also for the native-like competence acquired by advanced level L2 learners.