Earticle

Communication occurs in contexts and those contexts cannot be separated from culture. We therefore claim that culture needs to be included in language teaching and learning and raise issues about the cultural content of the tools which play perhaps the most important role in how culture is presented in EFL contexts: textbooks. In addition to the target culture, we stress the importance of including the source culture of the learner and the international culture as well. In the first half of the study we create a list of criteria for the analysis of cultural content in English textbooks based on the literature on evaluation of the cultural content in textbooks. We then analyze selected textbooks using those six criteria developed in order to find out to what extent cultural content are integrated in college English textbooks and whether there is any difference in cultural content between native speaker and Korean ELT writers. Our results show that even though its importance has been well recognized and a number of cultural items are presented, in general it seems to be challenging for textbook writers to include balanced information about culture covering those six features in the limited pages of textbooks. Regarding the third research question, there was not much difference in cultural content between materials written by native speakers and those written by Korean ELT writers. The study proposes that textbook writers develop their own checklist to make more informed and appropriate cultural choices before the textbook is written.

This study examines compliment responses (CRs) among American undergraduates and Korean undergraduates with high English proficiency. The data was gathered through the instrument of written discourse complement tasks (DCTs), with four situational settings: appearance, character, ability, and possession. A total of 120 undergraduates from both countries participated in the study from mid-December until late December, 2010. The findings demonstrate that even Korean undergraduates with high English proficiency have a high tendency of using fewer Accept strategies, and more Evade and Reject strategies than the American undergraduates do. This means that the Korean undergraduate participants use an indirect approach in response to compliments, preferring modest strategies to CRs, which is because of cultural influences; their counterparts, on the other hand, prefer using direct CRs. This indicates that the participants from both cultural backgrounds use different compliment protocols, and CRs in both cultures vary in meaning respectively.

Prior studies have reported that L1 lemma mediation is valid in processing L2 words. On the other hand, this finding has been criticized from a methodological point of view. Therefore, this study investigates L1 lemma mediation by comparing how intermediate and advanced Korean users of English respond to the decontextualized word pairs and contextualized sentence completion items. A two-part lexical judgment questionnaire, which consists of decontextualized word association pairs and contextualized sentence completion items, was distributed to the nine research participants. And the following recall sessions were conducted with the participants to examine their perceived similarity of the word pairs. Findings from the first part of the questionnaire, the word association task, portray that the same translation pairs seem to be more semantically related in comparison to different translation pairs. This result can validate the prior findings regarding the effect of L1 lemma mediation of L2 processing. However, in the sentence completion task, advanced Korean users of English showed low reliability on the same translation pairs and they tended to choose one word for the same translation pairs. These results imply that L1 mediation may not operate in the contextualized word processing for advanced users. Further recall sessions also suggest that L1 lemma mediation may be much stronger in the decontextualized word association task and for intermediate level users of English, while the advanced level users may access L2 lexicon more conceptually. Prior studies have reported that L1 lemma mediation is valid in processing L2 words (Jing, 2002, 2004; Kwon, 2005). On the other hand, this finding has been criticized from a methodological point of view (Vespoor, 2008). According to the criticism, though L1 lemma mediation has been captured, it is mainly based on a difference in reaction time of the decontextualized lexical judgment test. Therefore, this study investigates L1 lemma mediation by comparing how intermediate (n=3) and advanced Korean users of English (n=3) respond to the decontextualized word pairs and contextualized sentence completion items. Due to the contradictory findings and the methodological development in cross-linguistic studies (Fizpatrick, 2007; Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008), native speakers of English (n=3) were also recruited for the study in order to determine the strength of the semantic relations of the word pairs. A two-part lexical judgment questionnaire, which consists of twenty decontextualized word association pairs and ten contextualized sentence completion items, was distributed to the nine research participants. And the following recall sessions were conducted with the participants to examine their perceived similarity (Javis & Pavlenko, 2008; Kellerman, 1977) of the word pairs. The first part of the questionnaire covers ten same translation word pairs and ten different translation pairs; these questions asked the participants’ perception regarding semantic overlap of the noun pairs. Participants showed their semantic judgment through a six-point Likert scale. The second part of the questionnaire consists of ten sentence completion questions; these items asked the participants to choose either the same or the different translation pairs. Findings from the first part of the questionnaire, the word association task, portray that the same translation pairs (M=4.87, SD=.75) seem to be more semantically related in comparison to different translation pairs (M=4.52, SD=.58). This result can validate the prior findings regarding the effect of L1 lemma mediation of L2 processing (Jing, 2002, 2004; Kwon, 2005). However, in the sentence completion task, advanced Korean users of English showed low reliability (Cronbach's 𝛂 = -.275) on the same translation pairs and they, like the intermediate group participants, also tended to choose one word for the same translation pairs [ X2 (1, 0.05)=8.58, 𝑃 ＜.001, two-ways]. These results imply that L1 mediation may not operate in the contextualized word processing for advanced users. Further recall sessions also suggest that L1 lemma mediation may be much stronger in the decontextualized word association task and for intermediate level users of English, while the advanced level users may access L2 lexicon more conceptually.