• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.261-275
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• 2016

Many students have dualistic beliefs about mathematics and its learning- for example, there is always just one right answer in mathematics and their role in the classroom is receiving and absorbing knowledge from teacher and textbook. This article investigated some epistemic implications and limitations of common mathematics teaching practices, which often present mathematical facts(or procedures) and treat students' errors in a certain and absolute way. Langer and Piper's (1987) experiment and Oliveira et al.'s (2012) study suggested that presenting knowledge in conditional language which allows uncertainty can foster students' productive epistemological beliefs. Changing the focus and patterns of classroom communication about students' errors could help students to overcome their dualistic beliefs. This discussion will contribute to analyze the implicit epistemic messages conveyed by mathematics instructions and to investigate teaching strategies for stimulating students' epistemic development in mathematics.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.3
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• pp.141-183
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• 1997

This paper aims to find out the current state of early English education in the world(including Korea) and to suggest its more desirable direction, with special reference to TEFL in elementary schools of Korea. In fact English teaching in elementary schools of Korea has been put into practice as an extracurricular activity since 1982. But in 1995 the Ministry of Education proclaimed a policy to establish a TEFL program as the regular course in elementary schools of Korea since 1997. In this connection, the writer surveyed several kinds of theories about early English education to verify the necessity and validity of Korea's elementary school English education. The logical result from these theories is that younger children are better equipped to learn foreign languages with efficiency than older children or adults. However, as most studies are based on logical inferences rather than on direct observation or experimental evidence, we are not sure that those theories are right. In this view, the writer put stress on the preparation of educational environments to establish a more desirable direction of early English education in Korea, since Korea's elementary school English education will be practiced under EFL environment, not ESL environment. The writer also pointed out some problems of educational finances, the curriculum development process and its content, teaching materials(textbooks and tapes), English teachers, teaching methods, evaluation, educational facilities. This paper concludes that we have to try to solve these problems to succeed in a TEFL program in elementary schools of Korea and suggests several things for a more desirable direction of Korea's elementary school English education.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.3
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• pp.95-122
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• 1997

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of content and formal schema on reading comprehension. Five hundred fiftynine subjects from high school were assigned to one of the following levels and treatment conditions : (1) Higher level & Schema Activation, (2) Higher level & Non-schema Activation, (3) Lower level & Schema Activation, and (4) Lower level & Non-schema Activation. To evaluate the effects of schema activation. two experiments were conducted : one was related to the content schema and the other to the formal schema. To evaluate the effects of content schema, three different types of tests were conducted : (1) cloze test, (2) guessing the meanings of nonsense words, and (3) immediate recall test. To evaluate the effects of formal schema instruction, four kinds of tests were conducted : (1) sorting the sentences according to the importance, (2) identifying the signal words, (3) immediate recall test, and (4) identifying the specific information. For content schema condition, results indicated that the subjects given the titles or pictures before reading in "Content Schema Activation" treatment had better grades than those of the other treatment in all types of tests. regardless of their levels. Schema activation helped the subjects to increase the cognitive predictability of missing words and to participate in the tasks more actively with risk-taking. And it was also shown that good readers tend to process the words meaningfully, while poor readers tend to process the words phonetically or morphologically. Formal schema activation through teaching the text organization also had a significant influence on three types of tests: sorting the sentences according to the importance, identifying the signal words, and immediate recall test, but not on identifying the specific information. The implications from this study can be briefly noted as follows : (l) In teaching reading, the student's background knowledge should be activated as a pre-reading activity. (2) In reading, it is more important to emphasize the student's schema than the features of the text. (3) Various educational interventions should be introduced, especially for the lower level students. (4) Teaching text structures can be a powerful method for the top-down processing strategy.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.409-419
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• 2013

The aims of this paper were to review the usable possibility of the educational App Inventor Program in the field of programming education and to develop programming teaching materials that can overcome limitations of the established programming instruction. The study showed that the learners' motivations were strengthened through smart device programs. Containing the elements of STEAM, the teaching materials were developed for the logical and systematic learning that deals with elementary students' real-life situations, and that helps children follow the procedures of software development. By introducing the Waterfall Model to the process of programming, students are able to follow the software developers' thinking process. In addition, beyond the simplistic programming language and simply acquiring related knowledge, the App Inventor programming was designed to enhance students' higher-order thinking skills such as creativity, problem solving ability, collaborative thinking, and so forth.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.161-172
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• 2020

The purpose of this study is to compare students' perception shaped by two different university classrooms: Traditional Classroom and ALC(Active learning classroom). We conducted survey of 71 university students who were taught by an identical instructor using same pedagogy. The survey questionnaires asked respondents about their perceptions on teaching and learning and physical environments relations, teaching proficiency, social context, student satisfaction and immersion. The data was analyzed using Student's T-test. The results showed that ALC group, compared to the traditional classroom group, demonstrated statistically higher awareness on teaching and learning and physical environments relations, teaching proficiency, and instructor-student unofficial relations. Based on these findings, implications and limitations of this study were discussed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2009

This study focuses on providing the pedagogical implications of stress in English pronunciation teaching since stress is one the most important characteristic factors in English pronunciation (Bolinger, 1976; Brown, 1994; Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 1996; Kreidler, 1989). The author investigated stress production regarding in terms of duration, pitch, and intensity by a group of native speakers of English and a group of low-proficiency South Kyungsang Korean college students for their pre-test. For both of the pre- and post-test, the same stimuli, which consisted of a one-syllable word, two two-syllable words, three three-syllable words, and three four-syllable words, were used along with the various sentence positions: isolation, initial, medial, and final. Soft ware programs, ALVIN and Praat, were used to record and analyze the data. Since Celce-Murcia et al. (1996), Klatt (1975), and Ladefoged (2001) treat duration of the stressed syllable more significantly than other factors, pitch and intensity, with respect to the listener's point of view, the author developed a special method of teaching English stress using a traditional Korean drum to emphasize duration. In addition, the results from the native speakers' production showed that their main strategy to realize stress was through lengthening stressed syllables. After six weeks of stress instruction using the drum, the production of the native speakers and the SK Korean participants from the pre- and post-test were compared. The results from the post-test indicated that the participants showed great improvement not only in duration but also in pitch after the stress instruction. Pitch improvement was unexpected but well-explained by the statement that long vowels receive accent in loan word adaptation in North Kyungsang Korean. The results also showed that the Korean participants' pitch values became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex, due to their dependency upon their L1.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.121-127
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• 2021

This study is to propose a communication strengthening teaching model using action learning for Spanish learners, and to verify its effectiveness through a case study of Spanish lessons. This study was conducted under the same conditions by dividing 91 students from September 1 to December 20, 2019 into experiment and control classes. As a result of the experiment, both classes improved their writing ability to some extent, but the learners in the experimental class applying action learning showed more meaningful results in terms of the content, expressions, fluency of the text, and the affective domain test also showed a significant difference. The development of this teaching model, which is necessary for learner-centered convergence activities, is expected to be of academic significance as it can be used for other foreign language class activities as well as improving Spanish communication.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.193-203
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• 2022

The present study aims to investigate how general education EFL instructors who teach in a higher education institution in Korea perceive mixed-ability classes and the teaching strategies that they utilized to teach learners who have varying English proficiency levels and may have different instructional needs. Twenty instructors at a higher education institution in Korea who teach general education EFL courses participated in a questionnaire and three of the twenty instructors participated in follow-up interviews. The findings from the questionnaire and interviews showed that instructors' experiences teaching mixed-ability classes were positive. They offered clear guidelines for participation to help motivate learners and found that higher level students helped lower level students through group work. The instructors also felt that ESP could be a possibility in mixed-ability classes to meet the learners educational needs.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.23-28
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• 2015

Teaching programming skills is not only required for computer related departments but through the area of engineering and natural science. Moreover recently teaching programming skill is emphasized in software education for primary schools and secondary schools. Since programming ability is considered an essencial element of national competitiveness, we need programming learning system which alleviates the difficulty. We implemented Blockly webc Programming Convergent Learning System which is based on the graphic tools called Blockly by Google. Inside system problem sets for the programming beginners are embedded in the system. These problem sets are gone under more than 20 years verification and these problem sets may be used to help beginning programmers escape novice coder in short time. Blockly webc Programming Convergent Learning System together with already developed Simple Visual Language2 Programming Learning System is expected to play an important role as a programming learning system for the beginners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.73-84
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• 2009

Despite the growing interest among researchers in the field of second language (L2) phonological acquisition and its apparent contribution to linguistic and acquisition theories, there have been concerns about the lack of pedagogical application of the research findings in L2 classrooms (Levis, 1999, Derwing & Munro, 2005). Based on the belief that meeting an existing pedagogic need is something that should receive primary attention in SLA, this study attempts to bridge the gap between L2 pronunciation research and pronunciation pedagogy. In so doing, this study provides a narrative literature review of papers on L2 pronunciation published from 1994 to 2008 in Korea. The articles for review were retrieved from five database search engines. In addition, six journals where relevant articles most frequently appeared were selected and electronic searches of these six journals were conducted. A total of 117 articles which met the selection criteria were collected, and were reviewed to answer the following three research questions: a) What are the current research trends in L2 pronunciation in Korea? b) Do the research trends reflect a shift of focus on L2 pronunciation teaching? and c) What is the range of research practices in L2 pronunciation? The review of the papers indicates that the number of studies on L2 pronunciation increased sharply from 1999 to 2003. Some changes in research topics were also noticed. Research on segmental features of English was dominant from 1994 to 1998, but became more balanced with research on suprasegmentals from 2004 to 2008. This review also discusses the range of research practices in L2 pronunciation and makes suggestions for future directions in L2 pronunciation research.