정은혁 교수

Previous studies on teaching cultural aspects in secondary English education in Korea have focused on either analyzing English textbooks or surveying teachers’ opinions. They, however, failed to examine what the learners themselves think of the importance of culture in language learning and how they perceive the present culture learning practices. In order to fill this gap, the present study aims to examine the current practices of culture teaching in Korean middle school English classrooms from

Despite the growing demand for content-based instruction (CBI) at the university level, little research has investigated learners’ perceptions of and needs in CBI. Even these handful of studies have produced mixed results. The aims of the present study were twofold: (1) to identify the needs of Korean university learners in CBI courses and (2) to examine their perceptions of CBI with respect to both affective and linguistic aspects of second language (L2) learning. To these ends, questionnaires

The notion of communicative competence has received much attention in the field of second language (L2) learning. Sociopragmatic competence plays a significant role in realizing speech acts for nonnative speakers. To elucidate the nature of pragmatic speech use by nonnative speakers, many L2 speech act studies have been conducted, including requests, apologies, complaints, and refusals. As refusals are often seen as face-threatening acts by both requesters and refusers, this study aimed to inves

The present study aims to examine how a social variable such as social distance (social familiarity) affects the request speech act performances of Korean nonnative speakers of English and those of native English speakers. The study involved 26 Korean nonnative speakers of English and 20 native English speakers, using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The data collected through the DCT were analyzed in terms of the participants' use of (a) request head act strategies and (b) internal and extern

By the advent of spoken corpora, resources and descriptions of native speakers’ English usage are widely available. The insights from these corpora have been rarely applied to the design of textbooks published for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Consequently, the present study aims to apply these insights to the examination of middle school English textbooks used in Korea. This study investigates whether the EFL learners’ target language materials reflect authentic usages of native

Much research compared various types of reading tasks and showed that task types affect how readers comprehend the text. In contrast, few studies examined the role of task types in L2 listening. Despite the wide use of recall tasks and the usefulness of summary tasks in measuring comprehension, no study, thus far, has compared recall and summary tasks to assess L2 listening comprehension. An attempt to compare the effects of these tasks on text comprehension will provide valuable insights to bet

Despite a considerable number of studies conducted on requests, the majority of languagesand cultures examined were Western ones. Only a handful of studies addressed request speech acts of Korean learners of a second language. Even the few existing studies failed to examine how social constraints such as social status affect the request acts of Korean EFL learners. Consequently, the present study aims to investigate the similarities and differences in the realization patterns of request acts bet

Jung, Euen Hyuk (Sarah) & Lee, Mi-hyun. 2007. A Cross-cultural Analysis of Compliment Responses by Native English Speakers and Korean Learners of English, Korean Journal of Linguistics, 32-1, 143-163. Although studies have examined compliment response speech acts in various languages, little research has compared such acts of native English speakers and Korean learners of English. Moreover, despite the importance of topics and social status in the act of compliment response, attention so far has

The purpose of this study is to examine how cultural aspects are being taught in Korean middle school English classrooms and to offer some suggestions to help teachers deal with culture teaching more effectively. For this purpose, 62 middle school English teachers were surveyed for their opinions about culture teaching, and 9 middle school English textbooks were examined with respect to the systemicity and diversity of culture content. Based on the present findings, some suggestions were offered

The purpose of this study is to investigate how lexical and syntactic features of English are presented in the conversation sections of Korean middle school English textbooks. More specifically, in order to examine the authenticity of lexical and syntactic features presented in textbooks, these features were compared to those in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) Corpus. A total of fifteen middle school English textbooks from five publishers, used in the first, second, and

Jung, Euen Hyuk (Sarah). 2010. A Bilingual Immersion Approach to English Teaching at a Primary Level in Korea, Korean Journal of Linguistics 35-2, 445-469. Recently, the practice of beginning English language instruction at an early age has received considerable attention in the ELT field. Korea is no exception. There has been a growing recognition that it is desirable for young children to start to learn English at school in Korea. In this vein, some researchers argue for adopting the immersion

Since the focus on linguistic competence shifted to communicative competence, extensive research has examined L2 learners’ performance of speech acts including refusals. As refusals are considered a major cross-cultural sticking point for many nonnative speakers, active research has been conducted on the refusal patterns of these speakers. However, few studies have investigated refusal speech acts of Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The few existing studies failed to account

The purpose of this study is to examine the acquisition of sociopragmatic competence in a foreign language. In particular, the study investigates the effect of social distance on the complaint speech act performances of Korean learners of English. 24 Korean learners of English and 28 native speakers of English participated in the study. The data were collected via a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and were analyzed with respect to the participants’ use of (a) complaint head act strategies, (b) i