Earticle

This study empirically analyzed the factors that influenced the gap in English education between urban and rural areas, by focusing on rural secondary schools in the island area. To achieve this, the variables affecting academic achievement were broadly categorized into three categories: individual, environmental, and mobility factors. Differences in influencing factors between the urban and rural groups were examined through survey analysis coupled with 2-sample t-tests. The empirical models were tested using panel regression estimated by fixed effects. The results are as follows: First, individual and environmental factors were identified as important variables that can explain students’ academic achievement, but their relative influence varied depending on the group. Second, mobility factors were found to have a limited impact on urban students but were identified as variables affecting the academic achievement of rural students. This demonstrates that mobility factors such as population decline and student attrition are specific to rural areas. This study suggests that the model for English divide needs to be tailored to rural factors and deferentially appropriate to students in islands areas.

This paper explores the comparison of the characteristics of object-dominant English and action-dominant Korean counterparts. In this paper it is claimed that English as the object-dominant language and Korean as the action-dominant language show the following five linguistic features. The first concerns the plural markings. The plural inflections in English nouns depend on the inherent plurality of entities or objects involved, while the plural marking –tul in Korean typically shows context-dependency in the given event. The marking –tul typically requires the distributive reading of entities or plural events in the given context. The second concerns the modification structures for head nouns. The head nouns in the noun phrases in English may take the complex structures of modification for noun phrases(NP) which include pre- and post-modifications, while the those in the NPs in Korean usually take only the simple pre-modification. The third concerns English light verb construction, in which the action nouns take main verbal lexical contents, while Korean counterparts have a relatively limited usage of the construction and undergo the easy process of verbalization. The fourth concerns stative ‘be+prepositional phrase’ combinations in English, which often convey the dynamic meanings, while the dynamic equivalent in Korean should express the relevant verbs for the event. Finally, the fifth one concerns the conflation of English motion verbs, while Korean motion verbs are not conflated but realized as servial verbs. All the five features are argued to serve to indicate the object vs. action dominance of each language.

This research delves into linguistic patterns within a medical QA corpus focused on skin diseases. Our primary goal is to analyze these patterns and establish linguistic resources for the automated extraction of diagnostic information, notably disease and symptom expressions. A thorough examination of the corpus revealed three key linguistic patterns in user utterances: varied disease and symptom descriptions, specific query-related linguistic structures, and expressions giving supplementary background information. From these patterns, we classified 12 distinct query types. Furthermore, we identified three vital query-related expressions concerning skin diseases: WHAT, WHY, and HOW-CURE. These linguistic patterns were encapsulated using the Local Grammar Graph (LGG) schema, designed to efficiently produce training datasets for medical chatbots' Natural Language Understanding (NLU) modules. Validating our approach, a medical counseling chatbot named LIMA, trained using our dataset, achieved an F1-score of 0.908, underscoring the effectiveness and reliability of our proposed method.

Kövecses (2005, 2008) argues that some metaphors are cross-culturally universal but some are diverse. In discussing the metaphorical variation, he suggests ten aspects of metaphor which may be affected by the metaphorical variation. The ten aspects involve experiential basis, source domain, target domain, relationship between the source and the target, metaphorical linguistic expressions, mapping, entailments, blends, nonlinguistic realization, and cultural models. This paper delves into the question of how the metaphorical mappings are affected by metaphorical variations, observing the metaphorical extensions of digest in English and sohwahata ‘digest’ in Korean. The comparison between the metaphorical extensions of the same concept DIGEST in the two languages shows that the differences come from the fact that different stages of digestion are highlighted. The comparison between Korean and English DIGEST empirically supports Kövecses (2005, 2008) in that cross-cultural variation is observed in the aspect of metaphorical mapping.

This study aims to conduct a reading strategy teaching and learning program to improve reading comprehension of foreign undergraduate students in Korea and to confirm the reading comprehension competency and satisfaction of foreign learners. To this end, we applied a Korean reading strategy teaching and learning program to 54 foreign undergraduate students who took a Korean language course a common mandatory subject at a University in Ulsan, and analyzed the results through SPSS. The results of applying the Korean reading strategy program over 10 sessions were confirmed through pre-post-examination. First, the understanding of detailed content and the understanding of central content, which correspond to factual understanding, were statistically significant. Next, word and idiom reasoning, phrase and clause reasoning, and sentence reasoning, which correspond to inferential understanding, were found to be statistically significant. Finally, the increase in capability for critical understanding was found to be statistically significant. In addition, a survey of the pre-post class satisfaction of the Korean reading strategy program showed higher satisfaction. This study is expected to expand discourse on the application of reading strategy programs in Korean reading education and provide practical learner information.

this paper is to examine whether South Kyungsang (SK) Korean English learners can produce English stress well comparing to native speakers of English in terms of duration, pitch and intensity. The current paper measures the duration, intensity, and pitch of primary English stress of SK Korean English learners as well as native English speakers. The 15 female SK Korean participants were born and have lived in the South Kyungsang region of Korea. The key tasks associated with the current research objectives are to compare and analyze the length of the main stressed vowel of English words spoken by SK Korean English learners and native speakers of English and also to examine the difference of the average intensity and pitch values between SK Korean English learners and native English speakers. The results indicate there seems to be no difference in terms of the duration; however, the current results show statistical differences in pitch and intensity between SK Korean English learners and native English speakers.

The purpose of this study is to investigate lexical bundles used by EFL Korean learners in their spoken language. Lexical bundles, defined as continuous sequences of words, have been considered as the building blocks of language, reflecting psycholinguistic effectiveness, disciplinary variation, and natural language use. The spoken language of Korean learners is analyzed using the BUFS Learner Corpus of Spoken English (BUFS-LCSE), with a focus on grammatical structures and functions. For data analysis, 4-word lexical bundles extracted from BUFS-LCSE are compared with those of native speakers (LOCNEC). The results indicate that the grammatical and functional patterns differ from those of native speakers. The most frequently used categories in the grammatical structures are "subject + verb" and NP (Noun phrase). In terms of functional use, Korean learners have their own way of delivering messages, emphasizing a clear stance. These unique patterns do not necessarily indicate errors or mistakes but rather represent communication diversity within English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) from a pedagogical perspective. Therefore, Korean learners can use these results to expand their repertoire of lexical bundles based on real-life conversations rather than classroom-oriented learning.

The purpose of this paper is to revise two points of Goto and Ishii’s (2022) approaches and offer implications from the revisions. Concretely, first, Goto and Ishii (ibid.) explain (un)grammaticality of various sentences based on ‘Determinacy at the input of MERGE’ and ‘Phase Impenetrability Condition(PIC)’. However, they taxonomize phases simply into CP, TP, vP, and RP without specifying criterion for phase. Due to this, (un)grammaticality of various sentences cannot be explained in a unified way. This paper explains the empirical facts using Chomsky's (2015) Phase Theory as an alternative to such a phase taxonomy. Second, Goto and Ishii (ibid.) propose that Determinacy is a binary condition that applies to Search that determines the input/output of MERGE. However, the condition at Search operation cannot capture ungrammaticality of Chinese-gapped double object construction(DOC) and dative construction(DC). This paper proposes ‘a ban on the consecutivity of an identical information feature’ and provides a coherent explanation for the ungrammaticality of the above constructions. If the ban condition is tenable, it can be implied that the linearization condition needs to be added in Form Sequence(FSQ) rule or externalization, at least as far as Chinese is concerned. Finally, a brief summary of this paper is provided in the conclusion.

In the context of bilingual books, one language may assume a more prominent position. This study examines the translation of nonce names in two bilingual editions of Dr. Seuss nursery rhymes published in China. It considers the language privilege of each edition and proceeds to explore the correlation of language privilege and translation strategies. Additionally, the study establishes criteria for assessing the readability of translated nonce names across various dimensions and examines the differences between the two editions. The findings indicate that language privilege, discernible through formatting and dictated by the purpose of translated texts, influences the choice of foreignization/ domestication strategy in both editions. The readability analysis reveals variations between the two editions, suggesting a connection to the language privilege. Notably, despite its primary focus on the English language, the English-privileged edition offers a higher level of readability.