Earticle

The purpose of this study is to identify the effects of extensive reading with narrative text and expository text on the writing competence. The core difference between narrative and expository texts is their style. Narrative texts allow the author to be creative and tell a story in a way he likes, while expository texts follow some strict rules that he must abide. In addition, the aim of a narrative texts is to pull readers into emotional elements of the story and narrative texts include sensory details, a clearly defined mood, and strong underlying tone to help readers connect to emotional elements in the story. On the other hand, expository texts are fact-based and educational, and don't typically engage the reader's emotions. For this study, nine college students were divided into three groups; Narrative reading group, Expository reading group, Narrative & Expository reading group. And they were administered narrative texts and expository texts for 4 months respectively. Before students read the texts, they wrote essays with a specific title and then, after they read all the texts provided, they wrote other essays with a different title. With comparisons of the statistic data resulting from the official ETS writing evaluation, this study was conducted for the writing improvements for different types of reading. Results suggest that narrative and expository processing differ with respect to integration of text content with prior knowledge. In addition, findings indicated that students had more difficulty with expository text than with narrative text in terns of writing performance. And the students who used both narrative and expository texts got the best writing competence. This means that combined use of narrative text and expository text triggered much better writing performance in EFL writing.

This study examines how Japanese honorifics which are one of the first things to learn in modern Japanese were used, focusing on ‘masu’ in Japanese textbooks between the 15th and the 18th century. I checked its change in Japanese language history and compared it with that of the Japanese and Christian data. In the 15th century book “Iroha”, ‘masu’ was not seen but a honorific ‘soro’ was commonly used. As of the 17th century, ‘marusuru’ first appeared. After the latter half of the 17th century, before the middle of the 18th century, it changed into ‘masuru’ and modern type of ‘masu’ is also seen. The changes of ‘masu’ in Japanese language history are well known in Japanese textbooks. In addition, ‘marusuru’ is found in Japanese textbooks which was typically used at that time but was not recorded in the Japanese data and the Christian data because it is a slang.

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of vocabulary knowledge on the learners’ reading comprehension of the Korean EFL students. This study has been carried out upon the hypothesis that there is a significant relationship among vocabulary, ability to infer and reading comprehension skills. After the pre-test designed to choose the target group, twenty six participants selected as intermediate level were required to take Test I and II. Test I, where twenty words are underlined in the passage, aims to reveal correlational relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension ability. The result showed that there is correlational relationship. Test II intends to reveal the relationship among vocabulary knowledge, ability to infer and reading comprehension. To this end, twenty words were provided in the blank form in the reading passage and participants were asked to select the correct answers describing the meaning of passages. Although those words were not exposed in the test, students with high score in pre-test got higher score in Test II in general. This result implies that indirect vocabulary learning strategy is effective for enhancing reading comprehension and ability to draw inference. In sum, vocabulary plays a pivotal role in reading comprehension for Korean EFL students and the best way to learn new words is to direct life experiences and to expose various experiences or to read a clear context for word learning and more complex ideas.