• International Journal of Contents
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.62-78
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• 2021

This ethnographic multiple case study, based on Zappa-Hollman and Duff's construct of individual networks of practice (INoPs), explored English as a second language (L2) competence development and socialization process of a group of English-major undergraduates through their social connections and interactions at a public university located in an underdeveloped city in Northwest China. The study lasted for one academic semester and three students were selected as primary participants. Semi-structured interviews, student observations in English-related micro-settings, and associated texts were used to collect data. These data were coded to identify the thematic categories, and then data triangulation and member checking were conducted to select the most representative evidence to provide an in-depth description of students' perspective about mediating their English L2 socialization by their INoPs. Findings showed that factors in the formation of students' INoPs, including intensity, density, and nature, played significant roles in their academic or affective returns from their English learning, both of which had a substantial influence on the students' English L2 socialization. Considering that the macro-setting was a non-English, underdeveloped monolingual society, both educational institutions and individual students need to seek and create more English-mediated interactional opportunities to develop their English proficiency and adapt to local English learning communities.

• 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.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.161-169
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• 2017

We often use spellcheckers in order to correct the syntactic errors in our documents. However, these computer programs are not enough for elementary school students, because their sentences are not smooth even after correcting the syntactic errors in many cases. In this paper, we introduce an automated method for evaluating the smoothness of two synonymous sentences. This method uses a recurrent neural network to solve the problem of long-term dependencies and exploits subwords to cope with the rare word problem. We trained the recurrent neural network language model based on a monolingual corpus of about two million English sentences. In our experiments, the trained model successfully selected the more smooth sentences for all of nine types of test set. We expect that our approach will help in elementary school writing after being implemented as an application for smart devices.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.254-261
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• 2011

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the characteristics of disfluency in 3~5 year-old multicultural family children(MFC). 24 children(12 MFC, 12 Korean monolingual children, KMC with the same chronological age and language age) participated in this study. The experimental tasks consisted of story retelling tasks(SRT) and picture description tasks(PDT). In all the tasks, the scores of total disfluency of the MFC were significantly higher than those of the KMC. In all the tasks, the frequency of abnormal disfluency of the MFC were significantly higher than those of the KMC and the speech rates of the MFC were significantly lower than those of the KMC. The disfluency observed in MFC indicates that language ability influences on their disfluencies and fluency support of MFC is an important factor in general language support.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.46
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• pp.85-112
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• 2017

Donald Trump, the $45^{th}$ president of the United States, has revived the 'English Only' policy since the beginning of his presidential campaign. The monolingualism not only underscores his extremely conservative ideas, but it also reflects the nativist tendency that prevents the demographic and cultural transformation of the US, which is accelerated by globalization and transnational migration. In particular, Donald Trump tries to reconfirm the mainstream American culture that is now thought to have been threatened by Hispanization and the growing number of Spanish speakers. This paper examines the effects of "code-switching" and the possibility of a bilingual community by contrasting Donald Trump with Gloria $Anzald{\acute{u}}a$, one of the representative Latina writers who created a "border language." Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) includes Spanish glossaries and expressions to represent her bilingual realities, while attempting to translate from English to Spanish, and vice versa. However, the text occasionally demonstrates the impossibility of translation. In doing so, $Anzald{\acute{u}}a$ indirectly states that it is indispensable to present both languages at the stage; she also invites monolingual readers to make more efforts to learn and better understand the Other's language. A "border language" she attempts to embody throughout the text is created in the process of encounters, conflicts, and negotiations among languages of different ethnicities, classes and generations. It does not signify an established form: rather it appears as a constantly transforming language, which can provide us with new perspectives and an alternative way of communication beyond monolingualism.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.23-29
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• 2021

Recent deep learning-based natural language processing studies are conducting research to improve performance by training large amounts of data from various sources together. However, there is a possibility that the methodology of learning by combining data from various sources into one may prevent performance improvement. In the case of machine translation, data deviation occurs due to differences in translation(liberal, literal), style(colloquial, written, formal, etc.), domains, etc. Combining these corpora into one for learning can adversely affect performance. In this paper, we propose a new Corpus Weight Balance(CWB) method that considers the balance between parallel corpora in machine translation. As a result of the experiment, the model trained with balanced corpus showed better performance than the existing model. In addition, we propose an additional corpus construction process that enables coexistence with the human translation market, which can build high-quality parallel corpus even with a monolingual corpus.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.178-185
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• 2022

This study compared and analyzed the characteristics of new words by classifying 197 newly coined Korean and Chinese characters in 2017 and 2018 into single, compound, derivative, abbreviated, and hybrid words according to the coined method. In the case of a single language, Korean is all words borrowed from Chinese and English. However, no monolingual language appeared in Chinese. In the case of compound words, the format of the Chinese synthesis method was much more diverse and the generative power was stronger than that of Korea. In the case of derivatives, there are not many prefixes in both countries, and Korean suffixes have the strongest productivity of Chinese suffixes and weak productivity of foreign and native suffixes. Korean foreign language suffixes were characterized by relatively more appearance than Chinese. In the case of abbreviations, it can be seen that the productivity of dark syllables is stronger for Korean abbreviations, and the productivity of empty syllables is stronger for Chinese abbreviations. In the case of mixed languages, the hybrid form of Korean was much more diverse than that of Chinese. Through this study, it will be possible to help Chinese Korean learners understand the process of forming a new language, and to develop their ability to guess the meaning of Korean words while learning a new language.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.28
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• pp.115-139
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• 2012

Interval or duration of segments, syllables, words and phrases is an important acoustic feature which influences the naturalness of speech. A number of cross-sectional studies regarding acoustic characteristics of children's speech development found that intervals of segments, syllables, words and phrases tend to change with the growing age. One hypothesis assumed that decreases in intervals would be greater when children were younger and smaller decreases in intervals when older (Thelen,1991), it has been supported by quite a number of researches on the basis of cross-sectional studies (Tingley & Allen,1975; Kent & Forner,1980; Chermak & Schneiderman, 1986), but the other hypothesis predicted that decreases in intervals would be smaller when children were younger and greater decreases in intervals when older (Smith, Kenney & Hussain, 1996). Researchers seem to come up with conflicting postulations and inconsistent results about the change trends concerning intervals of segments, syllables, words and phrases, leaving it as an issue unresolved. Most acoustic investigations of children's speech production have been conducted via cross-sectional designs, which involves studying several groups of children. So far, there are only a few longitudinal studies. This issue needs more longitudinal investigations; moreover, the acoustic measures of the intervals of child speech are hardly available. All former studies focus on word stages excluding the babbling stages especially the canonical babbling stage, but we need to find out when concrete changes of intervals begin to occur and what causes the changes. Therefore, we conducted an acoustic study of interval characteristics of segments and words concerning Canonical Babble ( CB) and early speech in an infant aged from 0;9 to 2;4 acquiring Mandarin Chinese. The current research addresses the following two questions: 1. Whether decreases in interval would be greater when children were younger and smaller when they were older or vice versa? 2. Whether the child speech concerning the acoustic features of interval drifts in the direction of the language they are exposed to? The female infant whose L1 was Southern Mandarin living in Changsha was audio- and video-taped at her home for about one hour almost on a weekly basis during her age range from 0;9 to 2;4 under natural observation by us investigators. The recordings were digitized. Parts of the digitized material were labeled. All the repetitions were excluded. The utterances were extracted from 44 sessions ranging from 30 minutes to one hour. The utterances were divided into segments as well as syllable-sized units. Age stages are 0;9-1;0,1;1-1;5, 1;6-2;0, 2;1-2;4. The subject was a monolingual normal child from parents with a good education. The infant was audio-and video-taped in her home almost every week. The data were digitized, segments and syllables from 44 sessions spanning the transition from babble to speech were transcribed in narrow IPA and coded for analysis. Babble was coded from age 0;9-1;0, and words were coded from 1;0 to 2;4, the data has been checked by two professionally trained persons who majored in phonetics. The present investigation is a longitudinal analysis of some temporal characteristics of the child speech during the age periods of 0;9-1;0, 1;1-1;5, 1;6-2;0, 2;1-2;4. The answer to Research Question 1 is that our results are in agreement with neither of the hypotheses. One hypothesis assumed that decreases in intervals would be greater when children were younger and smaller decreases in intervals when older (Thelen,1991); but the other hypothesis predicted that decreases in intervals would be smaller when children were younger and greater decreases in intervals when older (Smith, Kenney & Hussain, 1996). On the whole, there is a tendency of decrease in segmental and syllabic duration with the growing age, but the changes are not drastic and abrupt. For example, /a/ after /k/ in Table 1 has greater decrease during 1;1-1;5, while /a/ after /p/, /t/ and /w/ has greater decrease during 2;1-2;4. /ka/ has greater decrease during 1;1-1;5, while /ta/ and /na/ has greater decrease during 2;1-2;4.Across the age periods, interval change experiences lots of fluctuation all the time. The answer to Research Question 2 is yes. Babbling stage is a period in which the children's acoustic features of intervals of segments, syllables, words and phrases is shifted in the direction of the language to be learned, babbling and children's speech emergence is greatly influenced by ambient language. The phonetic changes in terms of duration would go on until as late as 10-12 years of age before reaching adult-like levels. Definitely, with the increase of exposure to ambient language, the variation would be less and less until they attain the adult-like competence. Via the analysis of the SPSS 15.0, the decrease of segmental and syllabic intervals across the four age periods proves to be of no significant difference (p>0.05). It means that the change of segmental and syllabic intervals is continuous. It reveals that the process of child speech development is gradual and cumulative.