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This paper examines whether 'Open-ended Mapped Role-plays' (abbreviated as OMRs hereafter) can reduce the learners' test anxiety and activate their performances in the test. For this question to be answered the following two questions are asked. Firstly, it asks about the learners' perceptions of using OMR compare to interview types (abbreviated as IT hereafter). Secondly, it also examines whether their decreased test anxiety and positive perceptions toward the assessments would encourage them to perform their best. In order to answer these questions, the IT and the OMR were conducted in two English classes of two schools. Two post surveys were carried out after taking the two assessments. From this research it was found out that this type of OMRs can be effective in reducing test anxiety of the testees and in increasing learners' best performances on the test.

Phonological opacity has long been of interest in current phonology especially after theories of constraint interaction prevailed. Facing the issue, Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains abandons parallelism and introduces derivation and the set of Precedence constraints to specify orders of faithfulness violations in a derivation. Although this new version of Optimality Theory has successfully accounted for most controversial cases, it turns out to have some fatal drawbacks to Precedence and needs to be revised. This paper first reviews earlier Optimality approaches such as constraint conjunction and Comparative Markedness to chain shifts to see how they deal with chain shifts, a famous type of counterfeeding process. Then it applies OT-CC with Precedence to chain shifts. Finally, this paper proposes a novel set of anti-Precedence constraints by which the second member of Precedence should not be violated if the chain includes violation of the first member.

Previous studies on the pronunciation of English vowels reported that Korean learners had difficulty producing English tense and lax vowel pairs distinctively. The acoustic comparisons of those studies are mostly based on formant measurements at a single slice of a given vowel section. However, the English vowels usually show dynamic spectral changes across the segment, and only partial data on the vowel segment may be insufficient. The purpose of this paper is to compare the dynamic formant trajectories of English high tense and lax vowel pairs produced by twenty Korean and American males and females. Results showed that the American males and females produced the tense and lax pairs much more distinctly than the Korean counterparts did. Many fine-grained differences along the six measurement points were observed both in the formant trajectories and on the vowel space. These results suggest that more detailed analysis be required in the cross-linguistic comparison of English vowels. Also, the Korean speakers should pay more attention to the dynamic movements of formants in addition to the jaw and tongue positions in order to match those of the American speakers.

The purpose of this study is to diagnose how correctly and appropriately Korean non-native speakers of English can use determiners (mainly articles) and to seek pedagogical implications for English teaching by comparing 'determiner' error frequency in the free writings from two informant groups: college freshmen as English learners and middle and high school English teachers as expert users of English. The errors of these two groups are investigated in terms of eight types. This study focuses on the similarities and differences in frequency of their error types and how the properties of these errors should be treated in English teaching in Korea under the current coexistence of localized world "Englishes".

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 model to teach English, while others are rather critical of its implementation. The topic of immersion is a controversial issue in Korea, which is worthy of serious consideration. As immersion programs are increasingly being implemented in international settings, it is important to explore the theoretical and practical aspects of the immersion model. This paper, therefore, aims to explore the possibility of an immersion approach to English teaching in Korea. More specifically, this paper intends to discuss the benefits of early bilingual education and to propose an immersion approach to teaching English at the elementary level in Korea. First, the paper examines various definitions and types of bilingualism. Second, the positive effects of early bilingualism are discussed in terms of learners"f cognitive, metalinguistic, and sociocultural development. Third, different types of bilingual education programs are examined. Fourth, rationales and empirical support are offered for adopting the immersion model. Lastly, practical considerations are provided to implement the immersion model at elementary schools in Korea.

This paper aims to resolve re-binding puzzles in Korean VP-anaphora. The previous literature has demonstrated that re-binding becomes available in English ellipsis constructions when the focused constituent intervenes between the re-binder and re-bound variable. In this paper, we argue that the same does not hold in Korean, in that the matrix subject fails to re-bind a bound variable in the embedded clause even in the presence of Intervening Focus. We argue that the cross-linguistic difference between English and Korean is attributed to their different linear order. While focus intervenes the variable-binding relationship in linear order in English, this is not necessarily the case in Korean. We conclude that re-binding is constrained in the PF-LF interface, so that the location of focus in the linear string affects variable-binding. We argue that this resolves the cross-linguistic puzzle with regards to re-binding.

On the development of negation with respect to the answer to negative interrogative questions, I draw attention here to the explanatory adequacy of learning principles in child language acquisition, and present why the Subset Principle does not hold for relevant acquisition data. Choi & Zubin (1985) reported that both Korean children and English speaking children take three developmental stages in the acquisition of negation, regarding the answer to affirmative or negative interrogative questions. Both groups of children step through the same first and second stage of production of full propositional negation but diverge at the third stage, at which Korean children adhere to full propositional negation while English speaking children start to produce core propositional negation. Offering theoretical accounts of the developmental stages, Jang & Kwon (2008) deny the Subset Principle and support Markedness Hypothesis as well as the Growth Theory. In this article, I will point out potential problems of Jang and Kwon"fs arguments through reinterpretation of Choi & Zubin"fs findings, and argue that the Subset Principle does not hold in this case for a different reason. In addition, with retuning the notion of markedness, I will present different accounts of each of the three developmental stages against the Growth Theory.

The Japanese indeterminate numeral quantifier (wh-Cl) can directly combine with a quantificational particle ka or mo, forming, e.g., nan-nin-ka "ewhat-Clperson-ka"f or nan-nin-mo "ewhat-Clperson-mo"f. This paper focuses on the empirical evidence that the former gives rise to a "esome"f reading while the latter a "emany"freading, and discusses, from semantic and pragmatic perspectives, how these readings are formally derived. Semantically, we assume, in accord with Hamblin (1973), that the indeterminate numeral quantifier (NQ) is a set of alternatives. Following Jayaseelan (2001), ka is treated as a disjunction operator that takes a set of alternatives and produces a disjunction of it. Adopting Shimoyama"fs (2006) direct restrictor view of indeterminate phrase quantification, we derive the "esome"f reading of the indeterminate NQ-ka. In contrast, the "emany"f reading of an indeterminate NQ-mo is attributed to the pragmatics of mo, which triggers a presupposition like English even (Karttunen and Peters 1979).

On in Korean shows a few notable properties in its interpretation. It behaves like whole in English to some extent while it shows a similarity to all in other aspects. On allows only internal distributivity like whole, but it is equipped with quantificational force in itself like all. To capture its ambivalent nature, a member specification function is incorporated in the semantics of on, and a contextual function is proposed to define a contextually prominent group for the interpretation of on.

This paper attempts to find supporting evidence for Rice"fs (1996) and many others"f argument that the low vowels, [a] and [.], as in banana and teriyaki, are heavier enough to attract stress than non"]low vowels, and thus they are less likely to be followed by a geminate consonant even when they occur in penultimate stressed syllable than the other singleton vowels in English. To find whether the claims are backed up, I examined words with three and four syllables from the CELEX (Baayen, Piepenbrock and Gulikers 1995). The results of examination show that judging exclusively from the consonant doubling in tri"]and quadric syllabic words, the high vowel [.] rather than low vowels seems to be heavier than the others since it can easily get stressed in the light penultimate syllable even without consonant doubling. These findings are somewhat contradictory to previous claims; [.] is a high vowel; both phonological and phonetic phenomena have suggested that low vowels would be heavier or have more moras than non low vowels.