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This paper explores first-year junior college English majors’ L2 motivation, demotivation, and remotivation in relation to their factors and timeframes. To fulfill the purpose of a mixed-methods study, 63 students completed a questionnaire, motigraph, and retrospective essay; also ten participated in one-on-one semi-structured interviews. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that each of five timeframes (i.e., right before college, first semester, summer break, second semester, winter break) was intertwined with relevant constructs of L2 motivation, such as attitude, experience, and emotion. The participants also reported that these five time periods played a decisive role in shaping their overall L2 motivation as well as developing goals and strategies. As the participants represent a relatively under-researched cohort, the current study calls for further exploration of diverse contexts where L2 motivation may display unique trends and timeframes could act as a tool for understanding one’s L2 motivational cycle.

This study presupposes that it is important for international graduate students to know how to effectively paraphrase primary sources in order to successfully complete a thesis or dissertation. Therefore, this study reviewed cases of failure to paraphrase in theses and dissertations submitted by international graduate students on the basis of four rhetorical contexts. In addition, the types of paraphrase strategies required in each rhetorical context were indicated, and examples of actual paraphrases were presented and organized into meta-genre. The meta-genre summarized in this study is meaningful in that it explicitly presents the genre characteristics of appropriate paraphrase methods to international graduate students who are writing their theses or dissertations

This paper examines the phenomenon of lexical conflation, in which expressions consisting of two or more lexical items in Korean are realized as a single lexical item in English, focusing on two major types in such cross-linguistic correspondences. The first type concerns the conflation of serial verb constructions in Korean and lexically single verbs in English. The discussion on this first type is divided into two subcategories: 1) motion verbs; 2) perception and ‘give’ type verbs. Lexically coded conflations in English are discussed, along with their syntactic effects. The second type of conflation discussed concerns the three expressions with a noun included in Korean and their corresponding lexically-shortened counterparts in English. The first subcategory of these expressions concerns the expressions for specific spatial relations in Korean, which are realized by the ‘noun+postposition ey’ combination in Korean and by a single, specific preposition in English. The second subcategory concerns expressions for weather, which are realized by a ‘noun+verb’ combination in Korean and by the impersonal ‘it is’ construction with a single verb in English. The third subcategory concerns size-related expressions, which are realized by the ‘noun+adjective’ combinations in Korean and by single gradable adjectives in English. It is argued in this paper that the five expressions all demonstrate a much stronger lexical tendency toward conflation in English than in Korean.

Focusing on Free Merge and the Labeling Algorithm within a Minimalist framework, this study aims to investigate the structure of bare infinitival complements selected by perception verbs in English, with occasional reference to to-infinitival constructions for contrast. Although these two types of complement differ only superficially in the presence or absence of ‘to’, they draw contrasts in tense interpretation, auxiliary insertion, and passivization. Previous analyses have often attributed such differences to semantic or pragmatic factors without fully accounting for the underlying syntactic structure. This paper argues that these contrasts arise from the formal properties of T. In bare infinitival complements, T is defective and lacks a valued tense feature (uTdef), undergoing pair-Merge with v, which prevents auxiliary insertion and embedded subject movement. In contrast, to-infinitival complements involve an overt T (toTdef) with valued tense features, undergoing set-Merge with vP—allowing for auxiliary realization, embedded subject movement, and passivization. The properties of T determine the type of Merge operation involved. This analysis offers a unified account of perception verb complements and demonstrates the explanatory power of Merge-based derivations and the Labeling Algorithm in Minimalist syntax.

This study examined the foundational English literacy skills of 128 third-grade students from four classes in a public elementary school located in a metropolitan area of South Korea, with the aim of identifying disparities in their literacy competencies. All participants had received one semester of English as a Foreign Language(EFL) instruction. Employing the Acadience Reading K–6 framework, a diagnostic assessment consisting of 30 multiple-choice items was administered across eight literacy domains: Alphabetics, Letter Naming Fluency, First Sound Fluency, Phoneme Segment Fluency, Non-Sense Word Fluency, Word Decoding, and Maze. The results revealed marked differences in students’ literacy performance, with the onset age of English learning emerging as a significant factor influencing achievement. A multilevel analysis demonstrated a systematic yet uneven pattern of literacy development across domains. These findings highlight the need for targeted instruction to address domain-specific weaknesses and underscore the critical role of structured phonics-based instruction in the early stages of EFL learning. Based on the identified literacy gaps, the study offers systematic and pedagogical recommendations for implementing systematic interventions to strengthen students’ foundational literacy growth.

This paper examines Chinese translations used in Korean language textbooks and discusses effective translation methods and efficient placement for Chinese-Korean learners. This paper, accepting Baek Bong-ja's (2008) suggestion, argues that the guiding principle in translating Chinese language textbooks should be not the translated content itself, but that it contributes to the improvement of learners' Korean language proficiency. Based on this principle of translation, this paper argues that Korean sentences should be translated based on an active reflection of their conceptual meaning, pragmatic meaning, contextual meaning, and grammatical content. In order to verify the translation principle and detailed methods proposed in this paper, we examined the auxiliary verb construction ‘-아/어 보다’ presented in the ‘New Yonsei Korean Chinese Version’ and the translated texts of these constructions into Chinese. Through glossed and literal translations, this paper proposes a translation method that actively reflects the conceptual meaning and grammatical characteristics of Korean sentences.

This study revisits Levin’s(1993) intuition-based classification of the English swarm verb class through the lens of Frame Semantics to provide a principled account of how verb meaning constrains syntactic alternations. Corpus- informed analysis shows that swarm verbs canonically realize a ‘location subject + with-PP’ pattern, while the locative alternation is only weakly productive: promoting the Entity to subject and taking the location as object is generally marginal or awkward. Locative inversion occurs rarely in everyday usage and is largely confined to literary or rhetorical styles, and existential there-insertion is infelicitous in its simple form; however, a participial circumvention is acceptable. In contrast, causative alternation is unavailable because swarm verbs encode spontaneous aggregation rather than externally-caused compaction; induced fullness requires verbs such as fill, crowd, or pack. These findings refine Levin’s generalizations by integrating discourse and pragmatic factors with frame-based event structure, demonstrating that alternation availability follows from the profiling of Frame Elements rather than from surface form alone.

The objective of this study was to identify the key themes and topics addressed in recent research on AI-assisted writing tools in English education. Additionally, the study aimed to examine the research methods and participant groups commonly used in the selected studies, explore the reported pedagogical benefits and challenges, and consider the implications of the findings for language teachers, curriculum designers, and policymakers. To collect data, journal articles were retrieved from the Research Information Service System(RISS), and a total of 16 articles were selected through a multi-stage screening process. The data were analyzed using constant comparison, thematic analysis, and inter-coder reliability to ensure the trustworthiness of the findings. Through this process, five key themes emerged. In terms of pedagogical impact, the findings highlight several benefits, including improvements in grammar, vocabulary, coherence, and overall writing quality—particularly among students who received AI-generated feedback. However, a major challenge identified is the risk of overreliance on AI, which may hinder the development of students’ independent writing and critical thinking skills. The study concludes with a discussion of implications for educational practice and policy, as well as the limitations of the current research.

Binary oppositions have long been recognized as a fundamental organizing principle in both human cognition and linguistic structure. This research thus examines the binary oppositions in language, with particular focus on the interplay between arbitrariness and iconicity as exemplified in Vietnamese phonesthemes. While their existence has been widely attested in Western languages, their presence and functions in Vietnamese remain underexplored. The purpose of the research is twofold: (i) to strengthen the hypothesis that Vietnamese, particularly its modal particles and related non-lexical items, displays phonesthemic behavior at both segmental and suprasegmental levels and (ii) to identify methodological challenges in isolating and analyzing phonesthemes, particularly in tonal languages such as Vietnamese. Using a qualitatively inductive approach framed by Hegel’s(1807/2018) and Derrida’s(1967/2016) philosophy, the paper partly supports that phonesthemes are sites of dynamic equilibrium and exist in a continuum between arbitrariness and iconicity. The investigation thus contributes not only to descriptive knowledge of Vietnamese phonesthemes but also to theoretical discussions of how binary pairs manifest in discourse through such phonesthemes.