• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.821-841
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• 2009

This paper explores the ways to reshape humanistic values of the curriculum of the English department of Korean universities. The English curricula are usually composed of three fields of literary studies, general education, and English proficiency, whose conventional humanistic values have been currently dwindling. As for literary studies, teaching literature still hovers over the canonical works of past decades, not allowing students to access the canon with their own ideas and ending up with authoritative monologues. The general education field leans toward edited texts rather than authentic ones, which ignores a genuine path of communication between the author and its readers. Subjects for English proficiency such as "TOEIC" tend to be taught online with no teacher's presence for the nominal purpose of optimizing economic efficiency in teaching. All these testify to the attenuation of humanistic values in the curriculum, which motivates us to suggest some ways to reshape the values. Authoritative monologue in teaching literature can be shifted to the open-ended conversation by using role-play methods as well as accepting extra-canonical works into the curriculum. Authentic texts for general education prove to be preferred by students with the successful result of our experiment. Lastly, it is teacher's presence in the class that helps get higher achievement of "TOEIC" than some online classes. As suggested above, open-ended conversation, wider communication between author and readers, and human presence of the class will help reshape humanistic values in the English curriculum.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-27
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• 2006

This study investigated how EFL readers critically read texts which are written in English. Although critical reading has been discussed in advanced EFL and ESL contexts there has not been much research on the critical reading of beginning EFL learners. Many educators are recommending that a critical perspective be adopted so that L2 learners can become empowered rather than indoctrinated. In this study, the researcher has examined the critical reading practices of five beginning level EFL readers in Korea and five first language readers of English in the United States as they read a news editorial article. The significant findings were discussed related to critical reading practice of L2 readers. The findings of the study can help the educators in English education in improving the curriculum, the teaching methodology and the learning theory for EFL reading for critical reading.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.101-122
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• 2009

This study was purposed to discuss an educational concept of listening potential in ESL/EFL contexts as a counterpart of the reading potential concept in L1 contexts. As a preliminary condition for the concept of listening potential, this study investigated a relationship between reading and listening proficiency of ESL/EFL learners, focusing on roles of grammar knowledge in reading and listening comprehension. Reading and listening comprehension and grammar knowledge test scores of 231 Korean college students studying at a university in the U.S. were analyzed for this study. This study found that there was a positive correlation between reading proficiency and listening proficiency of Korean ESL college students. Grammar knowledge played significant roles accounting for reading and listening comprehension. Furthermore, this study found a difference between the reading proficiency and the listening proficiency across the stages of language development. However, results of this study did not empirically verify the concept of listening potential.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.113-126
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• 2004

Explicit reference to the work of other authors is an essential feature of most academic research writings. Corpus analysis of academic text can reveal much about what writers actually do and why they do so. Application of corpus tools in language education has been well documented by many scholars (Pedersen, 1995, Swales, 1990, Thompson, 2000). They demonstrate how computer technology can assist in the effective analysis of corpus based data. For teaching purposes, tills recent research provides insights in the areas of English for Academe Purposes (EAP). The need for such support is evident when students have to use appropriate citations in their writings. Using Swales' (1990) division of citation forms into integral and non-integral and Thompson and Tnbble's (2001) classification scheme, this paper codifies academic texts in a corpus. The texts are academic research articles from different disciplines. The results lead into a comparison of the citation practices m different disciplines. Finally, it is argued that the information obtained in this study is useful for EAP writing courses in EFL countries.

• East Asian mathematical journal
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.245-273
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to investigate environmental factors that affect mathematics learning of students in multicultural families. For this study, as study subjects, eight elementary school students and one middle school student, who were born and grew up in multicultural families in Korea due to international marriage of Korean father and foreign mother, and their five mothers were selected. To examine factors affecting mathematics learning and interests of students in multicultural families, relationships with parents, friends, and teachers were surveyed, and mathematics attitude test was performed. After conducting one on one interview based on collected questionnaires and results of the attitude test, qualitative data analysis was performed. As a result of survey and interview, positive factors affecting mathematics learning of students in multicultural families included arousing interest in mathematics through mother's mathematics teaching in her mother language and direct teaching, good peer relation, teacher's compliment and encouragement, and lowering the burden of language in accordance with characteristics of mathematics course.

• Proceedings of the Korea Society for Industrial Systems Conference
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• 2002.06a
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• pp.185-189
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• 2002

When we are teaching the programming education, it is very useful if we show that a flow chart generate automatically owing to a written out of the program. In this paper, we introduce the method of a flow chart generating from the simple imperative language for the While program. After the While program is translated by the Flow Chart Language program, it is generated automatically by making use of the java graphic library. Taking advantage of our results of the study, beginners can understand the flow of the program easily.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.365-382
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• 2009

This study aims to examine the reading materials of high school English textbooks to propose the integration of the literary texts into reading materials in the classroom for development of communicative competence. Five kinds of high school English textbooks were critically examined in terms of three factors -limited text types, deficit of emotional adjectives and non-authenticity- selected by the author as characteristics of non-communicative language teaching materials. With regard to text types, more than half of the reading materials were expository and simple narratives. This imbalance of text types led materials to the deficit of emotional vocabulary. These factors seem to be closely related to the issue of authenticity of reading materials. Compared to the authentic texts, fabricated texts are likely to make reading vapid and boring task. On the basis of these results, some pedagogical suggestions are made.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.245-259
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to investigate English teachers' perceptions about doing their own action research to find out the benefits of involvement in action research. I believe that teachers should engage in curriculum research and development because it relates to their own classrooms and because a primary aim for teacher education program is to give teachers ways of exploring their own classrooms. I focused on 17 graduate students who had undertaken action research during the fall semester of 2007 and administered a questionnaire about their perceptions of doing action research. The results revealed that their perceptions of doing action research fell into the following two categories, positive and negative aspects. For positive aspects, they experienced a sense of personal and professional growth and they underwent identity transformation from passive, etic-oriented, and uncritical to active, emic-oriented, and critical teachers. However, many of them expressed that major obstacles to doing action research were time constraints and lack of skills or training in conducting action research. Thus, it is suggested that both pre- and in-service teachers should consider conducting a language teaching diary study, doing collaborative action research, and acquiring all the necessary skills for conducting action research.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.209-224
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• 2009

This study examined the role of contextual knowledge in cross-cultural communication between non-native speakers on an interactive web with a bulletin board system through which college students of English at Japanese and Korean universities interacted with each other discussing the topics of local and global issues. The study investigated the influence of students' relative contextual knowledge on active participation in interactions and discussed the results focusing on the use of discourse strategies for meaning negotiation. The study argues that in interactions even between non-native speakers with limited proficiency, contextual knowledge in the topic under discussion affects the degree to which they accommodate to each other during communication and suggests that the focus of teaching English as a foreign language also should be given to what kind of contextual knowledge students need to obtain and how to express it rather than what level of proficiency in English they need to acquire.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Interior Design Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.281-282
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• 2005

The present design, which is the result of English Zone Project for 'I' Girls' High School in Yeonsu dong, Incheon, purposed to produce atmosphere like a cafe so that students can attempt more comfortable and diverse learning methods, breaking away from the structure and atmosphere of traditional language labs while providing functions such as experiential learning, teaching learning and native speaker conversation. In addition, it applied colors close to primary colors so that students throw away their fixed idea of language lab as a special class and access it easily at any time. Moreover, it was designed for the maximum changeability using foldable and portable furniture so that various types of group study can be performed. Ultimately the design project is expected to suggest methods of experiential learning distinguished from existing knowledge delivering education as it provides teaching learning methods beyond simple interior design.