• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.107-128
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• 2009

Literature had been at center-stage in the traditional grammar-translation-focused English classrooms up to the mid-twentieth century. As the Audiolingual Method and the Communicative Language Teaching have gained popularity in the English classrooms, however, literature has receded into the background of English education. The main reasons for using literary texts in the English classrooms for communication-focused English instruction need to be examined. First of all, students can come in touch with the subtle and varied uses of language through literature-based teaching. They also feel close to certain characters in the literary work and share the emotional reponses with them. They get personally involved in the plot of the story. Universal human experience and cultural enrichment are two other merits which can be conferred on students by literary texts. Such linguistic and literary experiences can be significantly integrated into the literature-based instruction. More significantly, the four language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) can be combined with one another and integrated into a literature-focused curriculum for English education. The value of literary texts in the English classrooms can be clearly demonstrated by effective ways of using such texts as Charlotte's Web for integrated instruction. The full array of benefits that literature can bring to English instruction, however, has yet to be fully realized. These potentials need to be materialized into classroom practice.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.64-78
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• 2007

For Korean researchers, English is essential. In fact, this is the case for any researcher who is a non-native English speaker, as recognition and success is predicated on being published, while publications that reach the broadest audiences are in English. Unfortunately, university science and engineering programs in Korea often do not provide formal coursework to help students attain greater competence in English composition. Aggravating this situation is the general lack of literature covering this specific pedagogical issue. While there is plenty of information to help native speakers with technical writing and much covering general English composition for EFL learners, there is very little information available to help EFL learners become better technical writers. Thus, the purpose of this report is twofold. First, as most Korean educators in science and engineering are not well acquainted with pedagogical issues of EFL writing, this report provides a general introduction to some relevant issues. It reviews the importance of contrastive rhetoric as well as some considerations for choosing the appropriate teaching approach, class arrangement, and use of computer assisted learning tools. Secondly, a course proposal is discussed. Based on a review of student writing samples as well as student responses to a self-assessment questionnaire, the proposed course is intended to balance the needs of Korean EFL learners to develop grammar, process, and genre skills involved in technical writing. Although, the scope of this report is very modest, by sharing the considerations made towards the development of an EFL technical writing course it seeks to provide a small example to a field that is perhaps lacking examples.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.133-144
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• 2009

This paper presents a method for constructing and using transliteration rules which are based on Phonics, an instructional method for speaking and writing English letters. Conventional approaches to automatic transliteration often focused on statistical methods. However, the construction or the collection of correct transliteration examples is always the bottleneck of the statistical transliteration model. Also, in practical domains where the collection of such data is very difficult, such as education and tourism, it is reasonable to build a system without much qualified data. Furthermore, compared with Korean orthography of borrowed foreign words, the proposed approach is much easier to construct, and can generate more refined rules. The experimentation result shows that the proposed approach can improve the performance of a statistical-based transliteration system.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.707-715
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• 2015

With the development of computer technology, the multimedia mediums that allow for animated videos, conversational illustrations are increasingly receiving attention for materials for educational purposes. Accordingly, there is a need to research whether multimedia resources and material is more effective compared to traditional educational material and resources. This study aims to compare traditional English reading and writing learning methods with learning methods using educational multimedia mediums such as illustrations or animation. Students were divided into a experimental group and a control group, and during 6 months the groups were exposed to different educational resources and on the basis of student evaluation feedback and grades, a new approach to English education is offered.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.653-668
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• 2012

In this study, an improved HMM based recognition model is proposed for online English and Korean handwritten characters. The pattern elements of the handwriting model are sub character strokes and ligatures. To deal with the problem of handwriting style variations, a modified Hierarchical Clustering approach is introduced to partition different writing styles into several classes. For each of the English letters and each primitive grapheme in Korean characters, one HMM that models the temporal and spatial variability of the handwriting is constructed based on each class. Then the HMMs of Korean graphemes are concatenated to form the Korean character models. The recognition of handwritten characters is implemented by a modified level building algorithm, which incorporates the Korean character combination rules within the efficient network search procedure. Due to the limitation of the HMM based method, a post-processing procedure that takes the global and structural features into account is proposed. Experiments showed that the proposed recognition system achieved a high writer independent recognition rate on unconstrained samples of both English and Korean characters. The comparison with other schemes of HMM-based recognition was also performed to evaluate the system.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1361-1378
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• 2010

This paper argues that it is possible to construct an analogy of the literary fragment to an organic individual on the basis of an autonomous system of organic unity by reading William Wordsworth's ways of self-writing in The Prelude. The organicity of a fragment is borrowed from Friedrich Schlegel's theoretic and literary approach to the Romantic fragment. Focusing primarily on the two "spots of time" in Book Twelfth, I attempt to formulate a reciprocal relationship between a work of art and a literary autobiographer in terms of the self-generativity of the fragment. To be precise, both the fragment and the autobiographical project presuppose and at the same time depend on the engendering force of an organic unity and its resistance to discontinuity, which ironically affirms the persistent threat of disruption and death. Rewriting traumatic childhood experiences as rites of passage into adulthood, the two specified "spots of time" show the dominant mode of memory operative in the poem. Asserting the prominence of the individual as the very vehicle of realizing universal humanity, Wordsworth tries to re-form his individuality grounded in his childhood memories in a literary fashion. Under the premise that the poet is remembered by his posterity, The Prelude is constituted and reconstituted in conjunction with different versions of each memory. The poem also marks the poet's unachieved project of writing a philosophical poem, namely, The Recluse; for this very reason, The Prelude, which is complete in itself, points to an eternal work in progress, turning the truth of every fragment complete in its incompletion. As a trope of fragmentation, an autobiographical individuality is reformed in the poet's process of writing and re-visioning while simultaneously being dispersed once again between words, sentences, and pages.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1997.07a
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• pp.176-178
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• 1997

To make a long story short I made up my mind to experiment with a multimedia approach to my classroom presentations two years ago because my ways of giving instructions bored the pants off me as well as my students. My favorite ways used to be sometimes referred to as classical or traditional ones, heavily dependent on the three elements: teacher's mouth, books, and chalk. Some call it the 'MBC method'. To top it off, I tried audio-visuals such as tape recorders, cassette players, VTR, pictures, and you name it, that could help improve my teaching method. And yet I have been unhappy about the results by a trial and error approach. I was determined to look for a better way that would ensure my satisfaction in the first place. What really turned me on was a multimedia CD ROM title, ELLIS (English Language Learning Instructional Systems) developed by Dr. Frank Otto. This is an integrated system of learning English based on advanced computer technology. Inspired by the utility and potential of such a multimedia system for regular classroom or lab instructions, I designed a simple but practical multimedia language learning laboratory in 1994 for the first time in Korea(perhaps for the first time in the world). It was high time that the conventional type of language laboratory(audio-passive) at Hahnnam be replaced because of wear and tear. Prior to this development, in 1991, I put a first CALL(Computer Assisted Language Learning) laboratory equipped with 35 personal computers(286), where students were encouraged to practise English typing, word processing and study English grammar, English vocabulary, and English composition. The first multimedia language learning laboratory was composed of 1) a multimedia personal computer(486DX2 then, now 586), 2) VGA multipliers that enable simultaneous viewing of the screen at control of the instructor, 3) an amplifIer, 4) loud speakers, 5)student monitors, 6) student tables to seat three students(a monitor for two students is more realistic, though), 7) student chairs, 8) an instructor table, and 9) cables. It was augmented later with an Internet hookup. The beauty of this type of multimedia language learning laboratory is the economy of furnishing and maintaining it. There is no need of darkening the facilities, which is a must when an LCD/beam projector is preferred in the laboratory. It is headset free, which proved to make students exasperated when worn more than- twenty minutes. In the previous semester I taught three different subjects: Freshman English Lab, English Phonetics, and Listening Comprehension Intermediate. I used CD ROM titles like ELLIS, Master Pronunciation, English Tripple Play Plus, English Arcade, Living Books, Q-Steps, English Discoveries, Compton's Encyclopedia. On the other hand, I managed to put all teaching materials into PowerPoint, where letters, photo, graphic, animation, audio, and video files are orderly stored in terms of slides. It takes time for me to prepare my teaching materials via PowerPoint, but it is a wonderful tool for the sake of presentations. And it is worth trying as long as I can entertain my students in such a way. Once everything is put into the computer, I feel relaxed and a bit excited watching my students enjoy my presentations. It appears to be great fun for students because they have never experienced this type of instruction. This is how I freed myself from having to manipulate a cassette tape player, VTR, and write on the board. The student monitors in front of them seem to help them concentrate on what they see, combined with what they hear. All I have to do is to simply click a mouse to give presentations and explanations, when necessary. I use a remote mouse, which prevents me from sitting at the instructor table. Instead, I can walk around in the room and enjoy freer interactions with students. Using this instrument, I can also have my students participate in the presentation. In particular, I invite my students to manipulate the computer using the remote mouse from the student's seat not from the instructor's seat. Every student appears to be fascinated with my multimedia approach to English teaching because of its unique nature as a new teaching tool as we face the 21st century. They all agree that the multimedia way is an interesting and fascinating way of learning to satisfy their needs. Above all, it helps lighten their drudgery in the classroom. They feel other subjects taught by other teachers should be treated in the same fashion. A multimedia approach to education is impossible without the advent of hi-tech computers, of which multi functions are integrated into a unified system, i.e., a personal computer. If you have computer-phobia, make quick friends with it; the sooner, the better. It can be a wonderful assistant to you. It is the Internet that I pay close attention to in conjunction with the multimedia approach to English education. Via e-mail system, I encourage my students to write to me in English. I encourage them to enjoy chatting with people all over the world. I also encourage them to visit the sites where they offer study courses in English conversation, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, reading, and writing. I help them search any subject they want to via World Wide Web. Some day in the near future it will be the hub of learning for everybody. It will eventually free students from books, teachers, libraries, classrooms, and boredom. I will keep exploring better ways to give satisfying instructions to my students who deserve my entertainment.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.15 no.10
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• pp.183-190
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• 2010

The present study attempted to identify the metacognitive strategies used by L2 writers at the university level as well as their particular aspects which might influence the use of these strategies. Twenty-seven participants, all of whom were enrolled in an English course, were asked to write an expository essay and then complete a questionnaire which includes their beliefs and attitudes toward L2 writing experience and the metacognitive strategies during the writing process. It was found that even though inexpert writers knew and employed as many strategies as the expert counterparts did, they were unsuccessful in the quality of their texts. Simply possessing a repertoire of metacognitive strategies was not enough for successful L2 writing. The failure of the inexpert writers to apply these metacognitive strategies in an effective manner was influenced by affective factors such as anxiety, self-confidence, self-concept, etc. As a result of this study, a pedagogical implication is suggested.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.31-60
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• 2008

As a way to situate environmental literary study, urban nature recently seems to have become an increasingly important part of ecocritical studies. Considering the recent deprecation on the alleged ecocriticism's ecocentric position, this move looks promising. However, a scrutable review of recent publications of ecocritical studies reveals a contradicting result that an ecocritical approach to urban nature not only lacks substance but also makes too much of the cultural and political issues of 'environmental justice' in which the traditional value and beauty of nature is totally sacrificed and neglected for its political purpose. Under the current circumstance that the environmental crisis threatens all landscapes of wild, rural, and urban, ecocriticism needs to put together "green" landscapes of wildness and "brown" landscapes of urban environment. The interdependence between outback and urban landscapes is best observed in suburban areas in which both landscapes coexist and merge. Provided with due learning and attention of nonhuman environment in their backyard, suburban residents have privilege of both appreciating nature's beauty and value of its own, on the one hand, and acutely reckoning urban environmental concerns related to their health, safety, and sustenance, on the other, in their own home grounds. The post-1980s in the United States has witnessed the emerging voices of suburban nature writings that speak for both green and brown landscapes, which have escaped from ecocritical attention. Among the suburban nature writings, those of Michael Pollan and Thomas Mitchell well illustrate how the green and brown landscapes are interwoven and, accordingly, how environmental awareness of both landscapes can start in suburban 'home.' Ecocriticism's validation as relevant studies of literature and environment may depend on these suburban nature writings which demonstrate an 'ancient-future' ethic of "home" based environmentalism.