최인철 교수

As the difficulty level of EBS prep books designed for College Scholastic Ability Tests (CSAT)has recently been hotly debated, a new version of CSAT (Engish) has been proposed by thegovernment to reflect the nature of criterion-referenced test. At this juncture, the present studyis intended to investigate the extent to which the overall difficulty level of EBS-CSAT prepbooks appropriately reflects the National Curriculum. In order to achieve this goal, the studyconducts a corpus-based analysis o

The aim of the study is to investigate the effect of a mobile application (Speaking 200) on Korean middleschool students’ achievement and satisfaction. Two groups participated in this study: the experimentalgroup who worked with the application and the control group who was provided with handouts. Eachgroup was divided into two subgroups based on the subjects’ score of a standardized listening test. Participants took a pretest at the beginning of the study and completed the posttest and survey a

The ever-increasing demand for English communication skills has required implementation of the method of Teaching English in English in every English classroom setting in Korea. This has necessitated recruitment and employment of large numbers of native English speaking teachers (NEST), which has proven difficult due to the scarcity of competent NESTs. With the advent of state-of-the-art technology designed for teleconferencing, however, e-Learning has the potential to provide a viable approach

Since the introduction of the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) in 1994,the speech rate in the CSAT English listening test has long been criticized for its low validity and authenticity for having failed to reflect the normal speech rate of real life English. It has been argued that too much exposure to this relatively slow rate of speech represented in the CSAT has been depriving EFL learners of the critical opportunity to acquire listening skills required to comprehend English at a natur

As an effort to maximize the reliability of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology for computer-based oral proficiency interview (COPI), the present study is designed to explore the applicability of ASR-based COPI for measuring temporal-based fluency as well as segmental-based accuracy of pronunciation. Employing English major college students to take a ASR-based COPI with valid test methods, the current study attempts to accomplish two research goals. The first is to investigate the exte

The recent development of state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology has enabled language testers to assess oral proficiency in a relatively robust manner. The validity of testing methods based on the ASR technology is now being explored in association with the efficacy of translation/interpretation. Given that dual language education is deemed more effective than immersion education (among various types of bilingual education) in an EFL setting such as Korea, it may be well

Serious inherent problems with practicality, intra-rater and inter-rater reliability overshadow the known positive washback effects of performance assessment in language education. In particular, it has been well- documented that inter-rater reliability poses a serious threat to overall test validity, since individual raters necessarily measure performance according to their own subjective severity criteria in language proficiency. However, language testing has witnessed a remarkable series of b

The deficiency of competent native English speaker raters and the inherent problem with intra-rater and inter-rater reliability of the oral proficiency interview (OPI) has precluded the full-fledged implementation of English performance testing, inevitably ushering in the computer- based oral proficiency interview (COPI) as its viable alternative with the help of automatic speech recognition (ASR). The plausibility and feasibility of implementing ASR-based COPI has recently been investigated wit

With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology utilized in English classrooms, the present case study attempts to explore the strengths and limitations of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) supported by AI chatbots. This study selected 20 experimental sentences, which were found to be difficult for a Dialogflow-driven chatbot to recognize in EFL classes. Then, the number of successful speech recognition cases was measured on the basis of the speech uttered by three groups (i.e., nati

This study explored the longitudinal relations among high schoolers’ English achievement, their self-efficacy, and English instructors’ teaching ability as perceived by the students. The study used the data of the Gyeonggi Education Longitudinal Study (GEPS), which provides 4,240 high school students’ survey responses collected three times over the course of three years. Only the data related to English teachers and subjects were analyzed for the purposes of this study. Latent Growth Modeling (L

With an ever-growing demand for writing instruction in the English Language Teaching (ELT), English teachers are expected to develop teaching skills in English writing by improving their own English writing skills. This need for teaching and learning English writing skills for teachers, however, has been impeded by the logistic problem posed by the inherently time-consuming nature of the evaluation process. Thus, a wide variety of automatic essay scoring (AES) schemes have been developed to empo

With the advent of ubiquitous era due to proliferation of network-based teaching and testing, the computerized adaptive language test (CALT) appears to be an inevitable method of language testing in the 21st century. The validation research of CALT is mostly conducted on the basis of the oral proficiency interview (OPI) done by human raters (최인철, 2004). This validation practice utilizing human raters, however, has the inherent problem with the internal validity of research, in that OPI ratings d

The present research explored the impact of different types of aural input recorded by native speakers (NS) and text-to-speech (TTS) on EFL learners’ performance in computer-based dictation tests. A set of computer-based dictation tests was developed. Participants in the study were 117 EFL learners, grouped into three proficiency levels. Results showed no significant effects of both input order and test types on the performance across the three levels. In contrast, there was a statistically sign

The ever-increasing use of the internet has resulted in the development of various types of sophisticated web-based dictionaries while diminishing the use of paper-based dictionaries. Still in question, however, is the efficacy of different types of media among learners of different proficiency or cognitive/education levels. This efficacy issue pertaining to the media factor remains intertwined with the language factor (monolingual vs. bilingual), given the contradictory perspective on the overa